some toughts as this must be what a lot of us are going through:
I've transfered about 600 CDs of raw and RGB images onto them. (but need another drive to put another 300 CDs on)
I could only manage at best 100 CDs per day
I decided to put unsharpened RGB tif files only (no space for layered PSDs and sharpened CMYKs. I'll add these when much larger hard drives are available/affordable)
4 CDs were unreadable (oldest were 5 years but age didn't seem to be a common factor) I had backups for 3 of them.
despite careful archiving onto CD/DVD I missed about 100 raw images (worst case was holiday snaps)
I still have the enormous task of keywording my archive (Extensis Portfolio 6) although care with folder names means that some were done auotmatically during cataloguing
checking for missed images was vastly more complicated than it should be. JUST WHY do digicams not allow us to increment the filename/prefix (so instead of DSC_0001 with reset at DSC_9999 back to DSC_0001 (doh!), we should be able to do 001_0001 then 002_0001, 003_0001 etc or just 12345678.nef {Using the camera folder names doesn't suit my workflow}. If I'd renamed raws when downloading from cards (with date format 20041126-10231205.nef ) it might have helped but how would I know I was not missing files then?
Conclusion:
I'm glad to have belt and braces at last
spread your backups over different media
around 40,000 7.7mb Nefs fit on 250gig and around 4000 RGBs on second drive
The LaCies are quiet and have run pretty cool during the task
It's such a lot of work that I'll buy some more drives (of a different make) to mirror the drives as soon as I can afford them (am looking into the options at mo).
There are an awful lot of power supplies under my desk! (why are there no switches on them so they don't consume power when not needed [wall switches are buried inaccessibly] at least LaCie's have "sleep" switch on front and go to sleep when computer sleeps)
--
yours Tim Andrew
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