CompuServe Messages

Shraddhan, Historically…VCR backup schemes have been unreliable. VCR's simply aren't designed to capture perfectly every bit of information put into them. For a TV program…that's ok. The picture quality degrades a bit…but no big deal. With digital data…the loss of even one bit of a single byte is too much loss. It must be reporduced exactly. Also, since VCR's aren't "read after write" devices, there's no way to know that the data was properly written out. The way most VCR backup programs get around that is to make multiple stores of the same data. They'll write the same "frame" over and over again, hoping that at least one of the passes got it right….or at the very least, that between all the passes, all the data was stored and can be reconstructed. Among other things…this causes the backup to be rather slow. I have NO idea if the program you're discussing has somehow or other overcome these problems and now is quick and absolutely reliable…but my strong suspicion is that those problems still exists. Don