Godfrey, Have you checked your backups? Sorriest fellow I met at work had 1 1/2 years of tape back-ups that he couldn't read. Seems that he had some problems writing the back-ups. Since then, I like to test what I've backed up. Regards, Bob S.
On 1/3/06, Godfrey DiGiorgi <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > what your overlooking with respect to the hard drives > > is that when they fail its catastophic because much > > more data is lost than an isolated CD/DVD disk or file. If you go > > with hard drives you would have to use 2 to prevent > > this like you say. ... > > Read the workflow description. I use hard drives in pairs for backup/ > archiving. That makes THREE copies of currently used data (on the > 'working', 'backup 1' and 'backup 2' drives). The chance of all three > media failing simultaneously is infinitesimally small, particularly > if at least one of them is disconnected from power and the computer > system except when backups are being performed. > > An advantage to working with paired hard drives is that if one goes > bad, you just buy another bare drive, format it, and block copy the > other one back to it. This can be done on a 250Gbyte volume MUCH MUCH > more quickly than recovering from DVDs or CDs since the hard drive > media is easily capable of 10x the data transfer speed. Try reading > 200Gbyte of data from one set of backup DVDs to another. As a test, I > transferred that quantity of data from one drive to another in about > 65 minutes over a FireWire 400Mbps connection. > > > Secondly, if you have a nasty power supply failure > > or surge issue you CAN destroy all hard drives in > > the tower that share that power supply/chassis. > > HDDs are also vulerable to malicious viruses, OS bugs, etc. > > which burned media are not. > > Each of my backup drives is in its own, external, separately > connectible power enclosure. They are always powered through a spike > protected power supply with emergency battery backup. The most common > cause of hard drive failure is poor quality power supplies so don't > skimp on the quality of power enclosures or the power supply to the > systems if you want to be safe. > > Your concerns about viruses and bugs are extremely valid for Windows > systems but virtually unheard of for Linux or Mac OS X systems. > Optical media, mastered from a buggy system, are just as good a > carrier of Windows viruses as hard drives, particularly if you master > DVDs or CDs with FAT or NTFS rather than the ISO standard file > systems. I know of several cases where this is how viruses > infiltrated entire companies. > > > .. I simply ASSUME the HDDs will fail ... > > It's always a safe thing to assume that media will fail if want to > keep data safe. Relying on *any* single archive of your data onto > *any* media format is foolish. I said it before, and I repeat it for > emphasis: "Multiple copies are the key to proper digital archiving." > Individual media longevity is a far less important consideration than > it is in the world of film and prints. Transfer speed, fast random > access, and high capacity makes maintaining digital data efficient. > > Godfrey > >
