DVDs for data dudes

During my second cup of coffee at Shirley’s, my computer greeted the day one recent Monday morning by refusing to boot up. While I was eating breakfast (special omelet) Windows XP ate itself for breakfast (blue screen of death). Which means that it’s time for my roughly biannual screed on computers and how to keep them from killing you, your business…or even your breakfast, though that last goal is probably a long shot.

As usual, Megabyte Computers was able to assist me. It’s amazing, first thing on a Monday morning, how many people come walking in carting their sick and ailing computers, some of which would surely rate shelf space in museums.

Given the Commonwealth’s location and related communications challenges, I think that Saipan is more dependent on computers than most of the outside world is. If your computer goes down in Saipan, not only are you out of computational power, you’re out of touch. In my book, that safely qualifies as an emergency.

And Megabyte safely qualifies as a strategic asset for everyone in Saipan. Those guys are good.

The tech at Megabyte was able to get my hard drive reformatted and XP up and running again, and I was back in action before lunchtime. My data, of course, was toast, a total loss, such was the nature of the malfunction. But I didn’t worry about that much, since I am anal retentive about backing up data. That’s especially critical in Saipan, where everything from blackouts to coral dust to humidity can conspire to give your computer a case of senile dementia.

I’d like to highlight a true lifesaver for computer types (and we’re all computer types these days). The age of DVD writers for data storage is well under way. There is so much hype in the computer industry that it’s hard to know what is necessary and what is not necessary, but I think that a DVD burner is a total necessity.

A DVD holds a nominal 4.7 gigabytes of data, or roughly seven times as much data as a CD holds. That’s a sweet windfall for all the physical storage space that it saves. A pile of CDs can quickly approach Nauru building proportions when you have to find a safe place to stash them.

Even an external burner (I use a brand called Plextor) can burn DVDs at blazing speed; a total burn, with data verification afterwards, took about 10 minutes the last time I did it. Having to feed, and retrieve, one DVD instead of seven CDs saves me a lot of time and energy. Likewise with the data restoration process.

I have found that a product called Nero (version 6 in my case) makes an excellent choice for CD and DVD burning software. Sure, most, if not all, DVD burners will come with some kind of burning software, but I’d rather stick to a familiar and capable brand than have to learn some other type that may or may not wind up being worth a bucket of warm spit.

Like many folks, I also use external hard drives for backing up, but I have a chronic distrust of all hard drives. And, even if they don’t fail, it doesn’t take much of a goof to overwrite files that, on some dark day in the future, you wish you hadn’t overwritten. Been there, done that. To my mind, one virtue of writable DVDs (and CDs) is that once you burn the disk, you’ve got an immutable read-only archive that can’t be messed with. There are, by the way, re-writable disks, but I avoid them for archival purposes.

If you think that 4.7 gigs is overkill for capacity, just wait until you get a digital camera for Christmas and start shutterbugging at Micro Beach. A 6-megapixal camera will produce pictures that are typically 3 megabytes in size if you go with the JPG format. A typical CD will only hold about 226 of such pictures; a DVD, by contrast, should hold around 1,500. CDs look decidedly lame when you consider that the 1 gigabyte memory cards we’re all stuffing into our digicams exceeds an entire CD’s capacity by almost 50 percent. Hey, you’ve got to store all that stuff somewhere eventually.

I hate spending money on computer stuff, but a DVD burner has proven to be a great investment. Times in Saipan are hard enough without losing your data.