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RE: (erielack) Storage of your RR photos for the future

On Tue, 31 Oct 2006, Schuyler Larrabee wrote:

> External, internal, whatever.  What matters is that the data be duplicated.
> 
> The last two computers I've had have included double disk drives arranged as mirror drives.
> Everything is recorded on both drives.  When one fails (not if, when) the other one will still work,
> and I get a notice that the "other one" has failed.  A trip to the computer store, and later in the
> same day I have a complete new drive installed, with everything I have on both drives.  Full time,
> all the time.  I've been saved from suicide (my own, you understand) twice now.

This is somewhat OT and sort of long, so if you don't care about data
preservation, just hit the DELETE key now :)

You can never have too many copies of important files such as your photos
and research data. I'm somewhat of an extreme case as I maintain about 20
computers in various operating system flavors, but that also means I have 20
times the hardware failures of most people too. At any given time I have about
65 hard drives kicking around and about 50 of them are in use. Maybe three or
four of them fail each year. I replaced one which died last week. I have lost
very little data in the past 15 years because I am fanatical about backups.

I have been buying hard drives in threes for a while now. Two identical drives
are installed in the computer and the third is a spare in case one of the
other two go belly up.

I now have three identical 300 GB drives in my main workstation. A couple of
weeks ago I installed a new video card and it somehow hosed my Windows 2000
SYSTEM registry file causing it not to boot. I booted up on the spare drive
and it promptly hosed that installation too! I slapped in a 80 GB drive with a 
February backup of the C: drive and tiptoed through booting it so I could
repair the winnt\config\SYSTEM registry file on the primary and secondary
installations. I decided that I'm safer if I maintain two active backup
installations instead of just one. I have tried mirroring disks, but I once 
lost an installation when both disks of the mirror somehow became corrupted
and I had to copy everything over from an old backup anyway. I have also had a
drive go belly up on my while I was backing it up, thus hosing the backup
copy in the process as it was only about halfway done. A good reason to have a
third copy waiting in the wings.

Each of the three current drives is identically partitioned into a 15 GB C:
drive and a 285 GB D: drive which holds all my photos, maps, data, etc. 

I now manually clone my C: drive each week after work on Fridays. I alternate
between the backups so I always have two different snaphots in time in case I
need to restore something which was accidentally deleted. It takes me three
clicks and 20 minutes to do the backup. With the D: drives I copy incremental
changes over by hand and do periodic full backups as I feel the need. Those
take a few hours. In addition to the cloned backups I also have a USB/Firewire
external drive and several 250 GB drives in caddies for backups. I usually
have two more copies of all my windoze computers on those as last ditch
disaster backups. Those are easy to store off-site. I also copy my photos to
my main notebook computer which has two 100 GB drives in it. I only have 9 GB
or so of photos (10,000 or so) so I have plenty of storage space for all of
them on multiple computers and their backups. At any given time I have at
least 6 copies of at least 95% of my digital and scanned photos. I don't need
to feel stressed out over data integrity :)

As my storage needs have increased my drives have been replaced. I leave the
old data on at least one of the old drives as archival backups. I have had
drives sit in a cabinet for 10 years and run just fine when plugged back into
a computer. If a drive isn't running, its bearings aren't wearing.

I used to use SCSI DAT tape backups, but they are expensive and a pain in the
butt. Once 12 GB wasn't enough to cover a full backup of a single drive, I
moved to the backup hard drive method.

If you use CDs or DVD's for archival storage of photos and data, make two
CD/DVD copies of everything and use the best media you can get your hands on.
Try to buy two batches of discs from different places and make copies of each
set of files using discs from both batches so a bad batch of discs won't hose
your collection. Store them in separate climate controlled locations in the
dark if you can. Use quality disc cases and not envelopes, they support the
discs properly. Do not write directly on the discs. Check your discs
periodically by copying their contents back onto your computer, if there are
errors, try copying your backup as well and then make two new CD/DVD copies of
the good data. Get a quality fire resistent safe or lockbox in which you can 
keep one set of discs. They are getting cheaper and cheaper.

The more copies you make, the higher the likelihood that at least one copy
of your precious data will survive until it is needed again.

Henry

J. Henry Priebe Jr.    Blue Moon Internet Corp Network Administrator
www.bluemoon.net       Internet Access & Web Hosting
www.railfan.net        Railfan Network Services


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