Couldn't agree more with your last statement. A little off-topic, But in my opinion, the long-term reliability of high quality (repeat high quality) DVDs is entirely dependent on how they're handled and stored. If they're handled/stored properly, I'd wager that you'd see a longer life than the current crop of cheap, high capacity HDs (depending on manufacturer). The worst current HDs in terms of reliability (Seagate Barracuda 7200 series) have failure rates of of between 10-26% Per year depending on specific model/size and based on a large sample size, while the best are in the neighborhood of 1-2%. In the largest installation of Enterprise-class drives which I personally sold and help install - 16,600 2TB 7200 RPM SATA drives (33 PB) at a national lab, we saw an ~ failure rate of 2-3% over the first 2 years. MTBFs are essentially worthless. The typical MTBF (which is rarely published for competitive reasons because calculating methods are not standard) isn't measured - it's calculated from the manufacturer's individual component values (every chip, capacitor and resistor on the drive). It's not unusual to see numbers such as 250,000 hours, which no one believes, so we're left with large samples as the best estimate, although individual opinions are more usually based on ancecdotal experience. Your advice is a good one - keep multiple copies of your data and regenerate another when one fails.

If you're serious about long-term digital archiving, the majority of current Blu-Ray writable drives will support the new Mdisc media available in 25, 50 and 100 GB sizes. Not cheap ($3-$10 per disc), but will last longer than any other recordable digital media currently available by far. The manufacturer claims that a properly stored Mdisc will last 1,000 years, and whether or not this is true, they have been extensively tested by numerous govt. agencies including DOD as has been previously mentioned on this thread. Also available in smaller (4.7GB) DVD format. They are not rewritable.

As an aside, I would not consider consumer-grade HDs to be more reliable long-term than good quality DVDs. I fact, while it's difficult to compare MTBFs for the two media types, I'd expect the opposite to be true.

In addition to old Charleston near The Battery and Fort Sumter (the target of the first shots of the Civil War, fired by the cadets of the Citadel), consider Patriot's Point ( http://www.patriotspoint.org/ ) for an unguided tour of some really interesting naval vessels including the USS Yorktown carrier (complete with many great restored vintage airplanes on the below flight deck), a wonderfully complete WWII submarine, The Savannah (first nuclear-powered merchant ship), a Fletcher-class destroyer, and others. Also the Citadel and their Friday afternoon parade if you're there on a Friday. Then there's the Charleston Museum and the H.L. Hunley (Confederate submarine) at the Lasch Conservation Center. Pat Conroy's "The Lords of Discipline" is good background reading, and perhaps they're still showing "Dear Charleston" at the museum, a great short film made by my friend Mark. Lots to see in Charleston...

I second the EOS 1V or 1N suggestion. I have 2 AE1Ps, an F1 and a stack of FD lenses, but I've recently been looking for a 1V or 1N to shoot film with my EF lenses (need the autofocus - old eyes). Both are great bodies with modern features that will work nicely with EF lenses at bargin prices. Alternately, you can pick up an RB67 medium format system for what approximately the price of a film back cost 10 years ago - another bargin if you want to shoot film and want the advantages of that (much) larger negative.

Ditto. I also use USAA with a rider for VPP. If you have access to USAA, it is consistently rated at or near the top by almost survey, and their prices are more than competitive. :thumbup: :thumbup:

Who made the SSDs and how long did they last? And was any of the data recoverable when they failed?

And it's well-deserved (for what good it will do). No question that Seagate Barracudas have recently had terrible reliability. It's not the first time. Many years ago the SCSI & FC Barracuda 7 had millions of failures generating a huge recall. Prior to that, Seagate made some of the fastest drives around and were the drive of choice for performance - sadly no more.

Western Digital's hundred-dollar drives don't have a stellar record either, but nowhere as bad as Seagate.

As of today, HGST seems to have the best reliability of the available consumer drives. Backblaze regularly produces a report of the drive reliability in their data center(s). This year the sample size was >47,000 drives ( a pretty good sample ), and HGST was by far the clear winner:

http://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015.

If you check the above-referenced study, you'll note that the 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 failed at 23.90%. I'm sure that there are many Seagate users who haven't suffered drive failures, but overall, the failure rate for their 7200 series Barracudas is abysmal - it's been over 20% since 2013. It's somewhat model-specific. Note that the 1.5TB LP has a failure rate of ~10% and the 4 & 6TB models vary from 1.7 to 3.8%. In contrast, the HGSTs tested varied from 0.5% to 1.9% depending on model.

BTW, I have nothing against Seagate. I recently pulled Two 20 year-old Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 4GB (yes, that's GB, not TB) SCSI drives and one 1GB Seagate Hawk out of a drawer, and all spun up and worked! BUT, those were enterprise-class drives that cost about $300 each in the mid 90s. I also had a NetApp NAS running in my basement with 16 4GB Fujitsu drives running for over 10 years without a single drive failure despite less than optimum environmental conditions; but once again, there were full sized enterprise class drives. I've had similar experience with IBM SCSI UltraStars before their drive division was sold. My point is that modern spinning disks are a marvel of cost per capacity, but there's a price to be paid in terms on longevity/reliability when you purchase 4TB capacity for a hundred dollars.

My complaint with Seagate, and perhaps the reason for the class action suit, is that the problem with the 7200 series has persisted for so long. Any company can have a bad run of drives, but this has been going on for 3 years now. For my part, I'm moving to high quality (Intel) SSDs as fast as I can afford it. Unfortunately, even with the recent price cuts, SSDs are still pretty expensive if you need 5-10TB of storage, as many pros do.

:thumbup: :thumbup:

Unfortunately no. If you check the above-referenced study, you'll note that the 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11 failed at 23.90%. I'm sure that like you, there are many Seagate users who haven't suffered drive failures, but overall, the failure rate for their 7200 series Barracudas is abysmal - it's been over 20% since 2013. It's somewhat model-specific. Note that the 1.5TB LP has a failure rate of ~10% and the 4 & 6TB models vary from 1.7 to 3.8%. In contrast, the HGSTs tested varied from 0.5% to 1.9% depending on model.

BTW, I have nothing against Seagate. I recently pulled Two 20 year-old Seagate Barracuda 7200 RPM 4GB (yes, that's GB, not TB) SCSI drives and one 1GB Seagate Hawk out of a drawer, and all spun up and worked! BUT, those were enterprise-class drives that cost about $300 each in the mid 90s. I also had a NetApp NAS running in my basement with 16 4GB Fujitsu drives running for over 10 years without a single drive failure despite less than optimum environmental conditions; but once again, there were full sized enterprise class drives. I've had similar experience with IBM SCSI UltraStars before their drive division was sold. My point is that modern spinning disks are a marvel of cost per capacity, but there's a price to be paid in terms on longevity/reliability when you purchase 4TB capacity for a hundred dollars.

My complaint with Seagate, and perhaps the reason for the class action suit, is that the problem with the 7200 series has persisted for so long. Any company can have a bad run of drives, but this has been going on for 3 years now. For my part, I'm moving to high quality (Intel) SSDs as fast as I can afford it. Unfortunately, even with the recent price cuts, SSDs are still pretty expensive if you need 5-10TB of storage, as many pros do.

And it's well-deserved. No question that Seagate Barracudas have recently had terrible reliability. It's not the first time. Years ago the SCSI Barracuda 7 had millions of failures generating a huge recall. Prior to that, Seagate made some of the fastest drives around and were the drive of choice for performance - sadly no more.

Western Digital's hundred-dollar drives don't have a stellar record either, but nowhere as bad as Seagate.

As of today, HGST seems to have the best reliability of the available consumer drives. Backblaze regularly produces a report of the drive reliability in their data center(s). This year the sample size was >47,000 drives ( a pretty good sample ), and HGST was by far the clear winner:

http://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015.

Incredible IQ and spot-on composition. I am profoundly envious! 😈

Have you tried the Canon Europe site?

First, as many have already said, cloud should be used for backup or archive, NOT primary storage. Secondly, if you use cloud, pick a cloud service like Amazon, Google or Microsoft which are VERY unlikely to go belly-up anytime soon. Finally, although maybe someone may be able to cite an example of a service going down without warning, the two cloud services I've seen go under both provided plenty of time (as the above example), to download and move the images to another service. Cloud is not an answer to all your storage needs - just another tool in the toolbox.

Definitely yes

I agree - that's my intention when I use it as well, the opposite of arrogant.