Thanks for the tips; a friend suggested today to buy an usb frame for hdd's and just regularly changing the hdd.

But I'm somewhat paranoid about hdd's as well, had a fatal crash a few months ago, it was a 3 months old Maxtor...and loss of a hdd is gonna be really hard, in the case of a dvd I'd lose only 4 gig.

This really sux as there were many rare maps/mods/mp3s on those cd's, which were always kept in their cases. Some of them I've used only 3-4 times, no scratches at all. 

It's not cheap, but I just bought a Drobo unit (http://www.drobo.com/). I filled it up with drives and now have 2TB of redundant storage. If a drive fails, no big deal, just hot swap it out and it won't even hiccup. 

is next to impossible. It's horrible in this day and age. 

As I said, I use a Drobo unit in conjunction with Time Machine. I can restore my Mac to any date since I started running Time Machine. It's about as easy as backing up is going to get. 

http://www.getdropbox.com/
http://www.jungledisk.com/
http://www.allmydata.com/

Don't know if I'd trust this sort of thing over time more or less than a DVD or USB stick though. There are arguments both ways.

I've been thinking about this recently. As I'm probably going to buy a home server rig soon anyway, I'm thinking of just buying a case with lots of room, several large disks and doing software RAID 1. And hope my house doesn't burn down :) (Bandwidth is too expensive down here on the bottom of the world to use an online solution for bulk stuff like photos or music). 

Just encrypt your backup yourself, then you can use any online storage/upload service for it. There are some sites that can mirror the file to multiple hosters for you. Then just keep an eye on those and reupload if necessary. Never trust any service where you upload it unencrypted.

Well, that's an idea if you are too cheap to even get a small webspace or vserver for it.

If you consider all your "media" (music, games, movies etc) backup worthy, well then you might be screwed... For me the important files are about 500MB. If you'd backup that once a month it would be manageble even with ISDN-speeds. Maybe do smaller backups of just the changes weekly.

Did I mention that Linux rocks for stuff like this? :) 

Yeah it's probably a good solution when looking at the spectrum of what is available.
But I mean the problem more generally. What about in twenty years? There aren't that many interfaces to read hardware from 1988 now, or odds of said hardware working well now. If you put your hard Drongo disks in a box and open it up in 2028 is it just plug and read? Or in 2048 when you want to show your grandkids something you mapped way back?
I think the most reliable way to document would be good prints and/or photos (with paper and ink designed to last).
A book like Pope's Brushwork project. If it was made on such paper with such a technique that it could last.
You still couldn't play it, but at least you had *something*.

Actually the odds of a quake engine being available on new hardware and operating systems is better, it seems to usually be the first thing that is ported thanks to John Carmack's far sighted idea of making it open source back in the day. Quake and SDL exist even on new from scratch OSes like SkyOS. 

bambuz

I think it would require diligence on the part of the keeper of the data. Meaning that you would need to carry over anything you wanted to keep every time you changed your back up medium. Like, if I move to some sort of solid state device, I would need to be careful to copy everything from my Drobo. And then if I move to some sort of device that stores data in space using worm holes, I'd need to copy it from my solid state device. And so on.

I agree it's a problem but I think anything that you want to write to and store in a closet for 20 years is going to have to be incredibly low level and generic - like you said, maybe paper. But even paper needs to be protected from moisture, sunlight, etc. Nothing is really permanent in that sense. 

that drobo thingy looks cool. I am pretty much a sucker for anything with blue LEDs on it. 

My CRT is showing purple shadows on things like black text on white background. Slightly offset to the right.
I think this is a shadow mask tube...
Is it unfixable? 

It was a cable issue, fixed it... 

it's so hard to find good CRTs these days. when mine breaks, i doubt if i'll be able to get another one. :( 

there are people selling them on messageboards quite cheaply... if you have some space to store a few good CRT:s. (not too moist or temperature swinging) 

I'd love to get rid of my 21", 50Kg, 80W monitor and get a TFT. Wanna swap? 

Is that an IBM? Oh well they haven't done displays for ages. 

I just checked, the memory from the lasting moving it was a bit blurred, it's "just" 30Kg. But 120W typical usage. 

Whats the top resolution? 

Just get an LCD panel that can do 75hz, then you can get max fps in Quake with vsync on and you're all good. :D

No, it's still probably not enough for the die hard CRT fans, but it makes it a bit more tolerable. I do actually understand why you'd still want a CRT, I just feel that as long as the response time on the LCD panel is low enough, the benefits outweigh the downsides. 

Bought an 6800LE from ebay today (35+10=AU$45). Anyway, looking at the box, i thought "That's weird. It says nothing 'bout LE". Anyway, it's a Leadtek A400 TDH, a vanilla 6800 i think. Better still, i just unlocked it to full 16 pipelines/6 vertexes, no problems so far. Sweet.

Quake 4 looks amazing in high quality too (never seen it before). GZDoom::Torment an torture runs nice... F-ing Darkplaces and Nsoe3 still runs like a dog though - laugh. 

Anyway, tested it through and through with Q4. My socket 754 memory sub-system is the bottle neck now. Benching id_demo001, CPU is only at 70%, image quality settings make no diff, and removing my second 256 meg simm to increase ddr speeds from 333 to 400, i get a 4% speed up from 48 fps to 50 fps.

When i find a cheap nforce3 board (with PCI lock) i'll give my sempron 3400 a good overclocking. Its a 2GHz part, but people report getting 2.6, 2.7GHz without much problems. 

From my long-suffering girlfreind....

http://www.samsung.com/us/consumer/detail/detail.do?group=computersperipherals&type=monitors&subtype=lcd&model_cd=LS24MYKRBQ/XAA

I know its only 5ms response, but frankly I cant tell the difference. When I used to play Quake in the office it was on an 8ms response monitor, and I thought it looked fine!!

Havent got it out of the box yet though.... 

I consider buying a 4670
Are there any known problems with quake and map editors especially Fitzquake/aglquake/QuArK ?

Or is Nvidia the better choice? 

Whenever the problems

"your map looks very very dark on my computer"

or

"the 3d view on WC3.3 doesnt work properly"

crop up, its always on an ATI.

Directx 10.1 though..... which you cant get with NVidia....

Personally I wouldnt mind a 4870, but if I was trying to make a budget system I would go for a 9800 GT (which is basically an 8800 GT with a new name)

Look at this chart:

http://www.guru3d.com/category/vga_charts_3dmark_vantage_06/ 

ATI seems to have the better hardware at the moment.
Can't put a 9800gt or 4870 in my computer. My PSU would collapse. Thats the problem and the 4670 is really fast an consumes very little power.

"your map looks very very dark on my computer"
Really ATI related? I think its the screen.
Maps on the family Pc with a CRT used to look really dark. And On my TFT usually gamma 1 is bright enough.
Both nvidia cards. 

what PSU have you got?
Im running an 8800 GTS on a 450w?

As for it being the screen which causes map to look dark on computers, I'm afraid not. Heres my evidence:

http://www.celephais.net/board/view_thread.php?id=60184&start=11&end=11

OK, so the links are dead, but the shots were of my level, and they looked dark on EVERYONES screen, so it cant have ust been the screen, if you see what I mean....

Anyway you are right, the ATI 4850 and '70 are doing pretty well at the moment, but if you look at the charts you will see that the 4670 is "OK", and I dont know how many frames-per-watt you will get compared to other cards, if you are really on a low PSU, but cards like the 9600 GT or GSO are faster, probably for a similar price....

but like I say, why ask if your just gonna argue with us? Just buy the damn 4670, I'm sure they're great! :-)