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 ----------------------------- 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