More Awesome Than You!

What is the best, most long-term reliable option for backing up arrtificial game files?  An external harddrive?  Tape drive?  What does El Presidente use?

I burn mine to CDs.

[eta] None of these are sims games, I have other torrented stuff that I've burned to disk. I've bought all the sims games, more fool me.

I burn to CD as well.  On the other hand, the torrents are also still on my larger hard-drive, since I have the space.

To avoid the Dance of 10+ Discs, I burnt all ARRtificial ISOs from Double Deluxe (Base Game+NL+CEL) to Seasons onto a dual-layered DVD, and use Daemon Tools to mount ISOs. All patches and a text file containing all serials are included as well.

The reason I'm asking is because mine were all burned to discs, which are unscratched and still managed to somehow become corrupted.  I don't trust it totally anymore for backup.  Even my legally owned, original manufacturer's DVD of TS2 is "unreadable or corrupted" despite having been installed with no problems on May 11.

Sounds more like it might be a problem with your DVD drive...

How big does a normal back up take? Not counting custom content, that's a seperate backup IMO. If it's not too big, I'd suggest an USB flash drive.

My actual downloaded games are backed up on my D: drive as well as on CD. My CC & 'hoods are backed up on the D: drive and on a 4 gig flash drive.

I sure hope not.  It's a new computer.  But someone else did suggest this also.  Hmmmmm.

Does anyone use the backup function in SimPE? I do, but I've never used it to restore so I don't know if it works. It seems like a really easy solution, though it doesn't backup CC (as far as I can tell).

SimPE has a backup feature, which may work.  However, I have heard of people having problems with restoring.  For backing up neighbourhoods and CC, I use the "copy folder to new location" method using Windoze Explorer.    I just set up a "Simsbackups" folder and copy Downloads and Neighborhoods folders into that.  Much simpler and faster than waiting for SimPE to load.  I have never had a problem restoring from backup using this method.

SimPE can not be used to back up electronic images of game disks (i.e. arrr! copies).

I back up everything to my external hard drive.  CDs can become corrupted, especially cheap ones.  I need the security of the external hard drive since I'm donig a PhD - though that is backed up in at least two other locations too.

I had a new computer with a faulty CD-ROM drive that died within 6 months. (This was before I started downloading cracked executables, and I think excessive simming with the disc contributed to its early death.) It was fully covered under warranty; the manufacturer shipped a replacement to me for free.

Any chance you got SecuRom? Breaking CD/DVD-ROM drives is one of the things for which it has a reputation...

Yeah, the drive is covered, but sending the lappy in and being without it while they fix it is not appealing.   :P  i will check for Securom, but I've been really careful to try NOT to get it!  ETA:  I did, indeed, have SuckROM on my computer.  It's been removed now, so we'll see if the problems fix themselves.   :P

Crappy cds can also be a problem. I've had several that just broke down and get spots on them. I burn to cd and have them all on my external as I no longer completely trust cds.

That's what I do, too -- external drives are so cheap these days, it's worth it.  I have Retrospect do auto backups of my whole My Docs folder every couple of days, and I also use AllwaySync after every play session to back up my hood files.  I also burn a CD or DVD of important stuff, like videos, pictures, music files, and stuff like that.

I don't bother to backup CD ISOs. If they somehow manage to break when stored on a 3 TB RAID, I'll just download new ones. Why sweat it?

DROOL!

They don't cost that much, Poofs. At this point, I reckon the price of such a monster is down to maybe $400, tops. How much do you waste on food a month? I figure that this represents maybe a month or two of leanness and rat-eating. You'll live. You can probably get one even cheaper if you acquire it in "broken" condition and refurbish it, but I wouldn't count on a Poofs doing that.

Yeah US$400, plus I bet it would work out to more than the equivalent here.

No, I can't repair hard drives. The techie ex has had some success soldering bits on the circuit boards to resurrect some of them though.