Dear Mike
I buy LaCie HD drives of any model type that is not the very latest, full of bugs, version. I rationise the cost aspect by spending about as much in a year as I used to spend on insurance just for book page film. A set of litho films used to be worth �5,600 but the same book will now fit on a DVD costing 89p.
Actually the efficiency of any large device increases because you use up all the spare capacity which you would leave empty on a CD. The real answer is to not get into any technology you can't understand and unravel yourself. I gave up on tape backup because I just wasn't clever enough to find the b****y data to retrieve it. After visiting a very tech aware lab and see them scratching their heads over a �2,000 RAID I decided against them also. I now have about 4 250GB drives and a few smaller ones with cute names like RAW and RGBs.
I am also now doing DVD backup as an offsite precaution. as well as spare off site HDs. The advantages of DVDs is that they hold a lot more than CDs. I'm not continually shuffling disks. They fit in less space so finding files is a lot easier.
Regards
Bob
On 24 Aug 2004, at 18:17, Mike Sheil wrote:
Like so many people the problem of how to store all my images has been a constant nightmare and I seem to be supporting the entire CD making industry on my own.
CD's do not seem to me to be an easy solution - they have to be filed, they have their own failure possibilities and when they day comes and CDs are no longer the storage media of choice it is going to be a marathon task simply transferring all one's CD held date to whatever the new media happens to be.
Now given that hard drive space is getting ever cheaper and one can now buy a 500 GB drive for about �230 it strikes me that the best way to keep one's data is by buying 2 such drives for archive and backup. By my reckoning such a drive will hold about 660 x 750Mb CD - I appreciate that the costs of HD storage are actually still more expensive but the ease of transferring the data and the shorter transfer process when the time comes and even HDs are redundant strikes me as making eminent sense.
I have to make up my mind in rather a hurry as I have a forthcoming shoot when I would normally generate about about 50 Cds so does anyone out there have any suggestions. I don't want to get involved in RAIDs etc but if anyone has recommendations as to suitable HDs - I am not interested in speed but simple reliability [ and price ! ] I would much appreciate any comments.
Many thanks
Mike Sheil
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