Hello Rod,

 BV>> Fair enough. It's interesting to see first hand how these people
 BV>> earn such high praise and respect. Four hours labour and one CD-R
 BV>> platter,

 RG> I assume that the 4hrs labour you are referring too includes the
 RG> installing of the CD-R drive and associated software?

There wasn't much of an "installation" - he has a PC made up for the
job, with a network card and CDR drive in it.  The files I wanted
on CD just had to be marked shareable with no password (five mouse
clicks!), and he just then remapped them thru the coax to his
PC and CDR drive.  The only mechanics of the "installation" was
plugging in a BNC connector :)


 BV>> for a lousy $120 and you think he's a professional. Jesus, you
 BV>> guy's have got things fucked up.

 RG> Well, someone has - I get my backup CD's made for less than a 1/4 of
 RG> this - and it only takes 30-60 mins.

The actual "burn" took that - the rest of the time was spent
compressing 2GB down to 600MB, organising them into subs on
the CD to make them easier to find, etc.  It would have cost
me more to hire a CDR drive for the day...

 RG> Admittedly it is my brother that does this for me - and although
 RG> computer literate, I'd hardly call him a 'professional'.

The price I paid also included 600MB on his backup tapes for a year..
so if I somehow lost both the PC's and the offsite CD backup, I'd
still have the ability to get my data back.   Call me paranoid
or whatever, but it took a lot of work and time to create/get
all that data.. I'm not planning to find out what it feels like
to lose the lot.


 RG>   PS. Chris - if you are reading this, and you want CD's made for
 RG>   considerably less than the $120 you are paying, give me a yell.

Ta.  I thought that the $120 was ok myself... but thanks for letting us
know.  With the amount of new and altered data running into probably
under 10MB/month, I can't see me getting another one done for a while
yet.

Regards,
Chris.


--- GoldED