Sunday, February 09, 2003

Data Security 3

Well, I've reconsidered the idea of placing a PGP or SecureDisk container file on the DVD+RW platter. The problem with the concept is that the DVD+RW media can only be re-written ~1000 times, after which Windows will see that the file contains a bad sector and will toss the entire file. Which, of course, means that you'd lose the entire container file (ick!).

So, DVD+RW media is more targeted at lots of small files that don't change often (e.g. collections of stuff that you're going to sort out later), or for backups of large files (such as the container files). Keep your container files on the hard-drive, and just make sure that you copy them to the DVD+RW platter occasionally. (Doing it this way, you should use the DVD+RW media as a DVD-R media and create a standard DVD that can be read on other PCs. At least you'll be able to cycle 2 or 3 platters to get child, parent, grandparent backups - without getting stuck with a stack of DVD-Rs that contain out-dated information.

posted by Wuphon's at 12:47 PM