how good is the data reliability with CD ROM and DVD RAM?

[Ali]

> Probably a good idea to use something like RAR with parity. I know I
> have
> downloaded some multi-segment binaries in RAR format from usenet  with
> several missing segments and as long as I had the parity file set it
> could
> successfully recover the entire archive.

Parity will only take you so far. It is the same as RAID - you can only tolerate so many disk failures before the whole thing collapses like a house of cards. It works well w/ UseNet because usually the errors are small compared to the data set. However, if you were missing say three RAR files out of six then one PAR file is not going to save you.

-Ali