> Since I back up all my pics and censuses to DVD anyhow, and all I will have
I just learned something recently that is a little disturbing concerning DVD's. I am only repeating what I read, I have no way to confirm its authenticity, but it sounds legitimate. Since DVD's were engineered originally for showing video, the normal error checking that is part of a hard disk is not a part of a DVD drive. Speed is more important than accuracy, because an error of one bit on a DVD will at most cause one pixel of one frame to be the wrong color, and the viewer will never notice that. Therefore, using DVD's to store data is playing Russian roulette - eventually you are likely to get burned. I actually had a situation this weekend which tended to confirm this. My brother has a Sony video camera which records onto mini-DVD's. In the past, I have used Windows Explorer on my laptop to copy all the DVD files to a directory on my hard drive, and I could take the movies we shot over the weekend home with me. This last weekend, the copy failed because one of the files on the DVD had a cyclic redundancy check - which basically means an error. Windows Explorer refused to copy the file, even though the disc played just fine in the camera. I am not even sure what I can do to be able to copy this disc, except possibly buy some ripping software (don't know if this will work or not). Anyway, the short of it is, DVD's can have errors that could cause you to lose your data. The article I read on this said that CD's do not have this same problem as they have the same sort of error correction onboard that a hard drive does. It has since occurred to me that DVD-RAM may possibly be an acceptable alternative, but I have not verified this. Have you unlocked the real power of Legacy? Legacy 6.0 Deluxe has 92 features not found in the Standard Edition. Learn more about these features at http://legacyfamilytree.com/DeluxeEdition.asp. Legacy User Group guidelines can be found at: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Etiquette.asp To find past messages, please go to our searchable archives at: http://www.mail-archive.com/legacyusergroup@legacyfamilytree.com/ For online technical support, please visit http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/Help.asp To unsubscribe please visit: http://www.LegacyFamilyTree.com/LegacyLists.asp
