On Jul 23, 2008, at 4:49 AM, David J Brooks wrote: > My current back up includes transfering files to one external HD, > Maxtor, and to either a CD or DVD depending on the files sizes. > > I'm thinking the CD's and DVD's may go, and add another external and > back up on both. > > I rarely travel to farms or homes that want to see photos, but with > the small size of the HD's these days, carrying one or two should not > be a problem. > > Any one see any potential problems other than all three HD's going > for a S%^*T.
The probability of two external hard drives both going down at the same time are very small. The chances of three doing that are infinitesimal. My system has a terabyte storage internally (2 500G drives arranged as a RAID 0). It is now continually backed up as I work using a 1T standalone drive (using Mac OS X "Leopard's" Time Machine backup system). The photo work is also auto-copied daily and on demand to two independent external 2T backup drives (set up as a RAID 1 mirrored set, essentially). That means there are essentially four copies of all the data that never goes more than 24 hours out of sync. Every few weeks, I turn on a file system/file verification check that validates that the data is without errors; it runs overnight and only bugs me if it finds a problem. It's easy to manage and operates transparently. If I were more paranoid, I'd keep a third archive/backup drive off site and rotate it with one of the twin mirrored set on a weekly basis. CDs/DVDs are simply too small to be useful, have more variable issues in reliability, and are much more work to manage and keep verified. Godfrey -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
