Marcia,

It seems that you have already purchased a Syquest drive, so this may be of
little help to you, but may help others heading toward a similar situation.
Until about 8 months ago, I was using tape backups to safeguard data... but
found/decided that it was not a viable alternative for archiving the large
amounts of data/project files and graphics I generate with every project.
(Have you ever tried to retreive a single file from an incremental tape backup
series?)  I also need to send graphics to service beaureaus and needed
something that could handle a large graphics files in a media format that the
service bureau could read.  Syquest and Zip drives are very popular for
archiving and transferring large files however there a couple glitches in
using these systems.  First, both of these formats are re-writable, so if you
want to use them as a permanent archive you run the risk of your data being
overwritten someday.  Second, the drives and cartridges come in a variety of
sizes and if you want to share data, you may find that the size you selected
is still unreadable on someone else's drive.  Third, the media cost for the
Syquest drive was over $40/cartridge when I checked pricing.

I finally settled on a CD-R drive.  Your initial equipment cost will be higher
($500-700), but there are several advantages.  Each CD-R disk can store
650megs of data.  You can write data incrementally (100megs today, 100 more
tommorow), but you can't erase what is already on the disk.  Everybody has a
CD-ROM drive so you have a very portable format.  Currently, I pay about $7-8
per blank disk and I'm told that the media cost will drop to about $5.00/disk
soon.  I typically create about 300 megs of project/graphics/data for every
project so I have saved the difference between the drive costs in media costs.

A couple notes about CD-R drives.  The speed of your computer can affect the
performance of the drive.  The CD-R drive writes data in real time, so if your
system can not keep up with the data stream, you'll end up ruining the blank
disk.  Many of the CD-R drives were made for home/general use and have 1mb
internal memory to act as a disk cache to prevent this when the drive is
writing data.  Sometimes, you can recover a messed up disk, but I have a
little stack of CD coasters from my early days learning how to use the CD-R
drive.  Also, if you are using the computer for other tasks while writing a
disk, you may mess up the disk and have to start again.  And, as a final note,
even though the CD-R disk is read-only, you can "blank" out existing data if
you do an incremental backup and don't select the proper option to include
previously written tracks.  Oh, one more thing... the CD-R drive can also
write audio CD's.  This can be quite handy if you have a use for that feature.



Mark C. Vang
Freya Ventures
2100 Mediterranean Ave. Suite 15
Virginia Beach, VA 23451
(757) 340-0099



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Date:    Mon, 21 Jul 1997 06:43:38 -0700
From:    "G. Brunschwyler" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: electronic archiving/publications

We are trying to determine how long we should keep our quarterly
publication in an electronic format.  It is costly for the syquest disks we
must store the information on, but we don't know if we should weight this
out with some future benefit of having the magazine in this format.
What do you do?
Any advice for us?
Marcia Somers
Editor, Southern Oregon Heritage
Southern Oregon Historical Society
106 N Central Ave.  Medford, OR