Be sure to store several copies if you go the large volume external hard drive route. They have a horrific track record at our museum -- we've had unrecoverable disk failures eight times this calendar year alone. Plus you wind up with management issues. How to keep track of which images are on which external and how to do bulk format transformations or batch renaming when files are scattered? If funds are tight, it's doable but not ideal. Being from LOC, I imagine you have the facilities to create a reliably backed-up and RAIDed SAN or other network storage. One disk fails, it's just replaced and all is fine. Plus, then any computer on your network can be a transfer station. Just have your interns pop the cd's in and go. It's working well for us.
Rebecca Snyder Smithsonian, NMNH -----Original Message----- From: mcn-l-bounces at mcn.edu [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Han, Yan Sent: Monday, October 20, 2008 2:41 PM To: Museum Computer Network Listserv; mcn-l at mcn.edu Subject: Re: [MCN-L] digital media migration I think it is much better to migrate to external hard drives (rather using CDs/DVDs) or massive storage. Depending on how much space you need, 1TB external hard disk costs less than $200. Rather than trusting the failure rate of massive storage (usually expensive), I would rather have multiple copies of data over cheap hard disks/servers. (Thinking about how Google built its clustered PC). Yan -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] on behalf of Leslie Johnston Sent: Fri 10/17/2008 8:14 PM To: mcn-l at mcn.edu Subject: [MCN-L] digital media migration All, I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has recently taken on a media migration project, e.g., retrieving legacy digitization output files from data CDs and DVDs, external hard drives, etc., for transfer to live disk and/or tape. I'm particularly interested in what sort of transfer stations other institutions have built for this purpose. I do not yet have an exhaustive inventory of what media we might be working with, but we suspect it's predominantly CDs burned over a 15 year period. The formats are primarily image files, although there are of course audio, video, PDF, and text files as well. Leslie ---------- Leslie Johnston Digital Media Project Coordinator Office of Strategic Initiatives Library of Congress 202-707-2801 lesliej at loc.gov _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l _______________________________________________ You are currently subscribed to mcn-l, the listserv of the Museum Computer Network (http://www.mcn.edu) To post to this list, send messages to: mcn-l at mcn.edu To unsubscribe or change mcn-l delivery options visit: http://toronto.mediatrope.com/mailman/listinfo/mcn-l
