Thanks for answering.

Is 7zip much better than WinRAR for safely archiving things? WinRAR has recovery record - dunno how good that is.

As for storing on HDD, it's an option but I'm looking at waving goodbye to a good 20GB of space on a 180GB HDD (that already has 17.3GB dedicated to porn). I'd have thought that Verbatims are a safe bet to store on - which is my plan.

 

I'm always a little uneasy trusting stuff to optical media as their quality degrades over time. With HDD's this is far less, especially when the HDD isn't used.

Of course, you can copy DVD's/CD's every few years, but that's a pain in the ass to me.

 

Verbs have a 70 year guarantee...

I think I will back up on Verbs and keep on HDD TBH!

 

GC should compress without much difficulty.

Wii images on the other hand have in 99% of cases lots of junk that is essentially random making it very difficult for any conventional algorithm to compress. Fortunately dack made the wii scrubber which removes the unused junk and replaces it with easy to compress 00's (meaning isos drop to half size or smaller most of the time).
There is also the option to create patches to restore the junk should you so desire.

Regarding data backup I believe rar does have some stuff for bad data but I find it easier (and far more reliable) to make par2 files with something like quickpar and shove those onto the disc as well.
http://www.quickpar.org.uk/ par apps are available for just about every platform going and are very widespread.

After this I suggest splitting the files into chunks around 50 megs with 7zip, giving them directories and burning them those to disc/adding them to a drive. 50 megs as it makes it easier to handle.

IMGburn for burning:
http://www.imgburn.com/

Good news part 2 is that all the apps have a command line mode of some form (except the scrubber I think) so you could make a batch file to create backup worthy stuff in a few minutes.