do you actually use this method? or are you talking in the theoretical sense? because I have a feeling this works better in theory than in practice
Yes. I only know two other people that actually care to back their photos up, and they do it similarly, as well (and one has more space taken up just in photos than I have for all of my data).
If you preemptively segregate files as you create/receive them, it becomes relatively painless. Getting to the point where it becomes habit, instead of needing to rummage through thousands or tens of thousands of files to find the right one...
that takes time and frustration to reinforce.
first of all 'keeping important documents organized' has nothing to do with the problem
if you have separate folders for pics of all your family members, that's organized, but it would still be a pain to get the latest from each folder
It would also make it a pain to get pics of everybody at <event>. If more fine-grained organization is wanted than putting pictures taken by X at Y on Z in a directory, it's probably time for software that has a media library, so that all that can be in a DB.
and even if you had some global file search to find all files modified after a certain date, you still have to recreate the directory structure on the backup media. That or just dump them all into the same folder where suddenly they aren't 'organized' anymore.
Or, drag folders into the lower pane, which is how pretty much every integrated-file-browser burning app works.
then do you remember when exactly the cutoff is for each backup? let's say you backup every saturday, but what about changes you made last saturday AFTER you backed up?
If it's that close, it's probably not good to use WORM media, until more time has passed, anyway. Recall: this started from
storing a HDD in a cool dry place. If you have to worry about the storage conditions of an HDD, it is probably resting for too long at a stretch. I have had the experience of being unable to get data off of perfectly healthy HDDs, because either the HDD sat, or the data was seldom read
(WD Red, FI, advertise they do wear-leveling, which could help prevent just that last scenario...but not the scenario where the HDD is left off!). Not just once; but several times, with backups verified after being made.
That said, the easy solution is the ubiquitous sharpie, in the case of optical media. If time is random between backups, for whatever reason, and it's a problem, pay up for flash rated for years of retention.
It just seems like a very labor-intensive, error-prone, sucky way to do things.
For synchronizing libraries that are being constantly modified, yes. Thus using qualifiers like, "static," and, "WORM." The stuff gets organized correctly enough to find a known file amongst it, and is then left alone, except for periodic read access. Dynamic data is a whole different ballgame, much more amenable to tape, flash, and HDDs (including "cloud"), with their associated pros and cons. Data that's going to be significantly re-organized, is still dynamic, even if the file contents aren't changing.
Tape is reliable, moderately fast, and expensive. For backup and restore, the serial access nature is not an important issue.
Flash varies in speed and reliability, but both are things you can pay to get assurances for, and it's moderately expensive.
HDDs are unreliable, moderately fast, but cheap. The market has effectively decided that it's worth it to buy many HDDs for redundancy, instead of paying many times the cost for a highly reliable HDD.
Optical media is slow, cheap, write-once, and varies in reliability all over the place, and has done so since it came out. Until recently, MCC was hard to go wrong with, and TY has generally maintained very high quality. I haven't had a need for BD, so I'm ignorant to relative quality of BD media makers (and guarantees of what retail brand/series will actually be).