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Archiving a Year to DVDs
17 October 2023
Our backup routine is robust. Nightly Time Machine backups from all three laptops to a network drive plus FreeFileSync mirroring our main machine to our main backup machine plus our Mirror Mirror utility to copy to local external drives of important data.
Archival Backups. An A-to-C USB adapter let us attach a USB SuperDrive to the M2 to burn DVDs with Burn.
And when we copy image files from cards to our main computer, we immediately back them up to two network drives and two external drives using a new version our Ingestor* script.
So we feel entitled to take our time doing our three archival DVD backups of image files, one of which we store off site.
But to our horror, it had been a year since we did the DVD dance.
Part of that was that the old DVD writer in the 17-inch MacBook Pro we use to write the DVDs had to be run very slowly to avoid write errors. So it was less and less convenient and more and more easily put off.
We mitigated that problem by borrowing Joyce's USB SuperDrive which allowed us to write DVDs at 8x rather than 2x speed.
But when we acquired an M2 MacBook Pro (without a DVD), we had to figure out just how to connect the SuperDrive's USB-A plug to the USB-C port on the M2.
We had a hub with USB-A ports but we also had an A-to-C adapter that had been included with our WD Passport drive. So we used the adapter to directly connect the SuperDrive to the M2.
Did it work? Yes, it did. Full 8x speed.
So we spent last evening using Burn to copy all the images we captured from July 2022 to July 2023 to four sets of three DVDs. While watching TV.
Burn says it's going to take three minutes to burn the DVD (and another three to verify it) but it always seems to take 15 minutes to get through it all and then we had 12 of those making three hours of idle time.
Which is about one football game. Or three incomprehensible PBS detective shows.
Or, as we prefer to do when we're not gassed, read a few chapters in some classic like Don Quixote by Cervantes or The Betrothed by Manzoni.