[Leica] Seagate - on backup

[john.nebel at csdco.com (John Nebel)]

Tina,

A heavy-duty and not all that expensive solution would be to install an LT04 
tape drive at each location and transport tapes.  Two LTO4 tape drives 
should 
cost well less than an M8 (see ebay) and the tapes can be probably purchased 
for 
$50 each, or so. Each tape stores 800GB uncompressed, 1.6TB compressed, 
however, 
images do not compress (very well jpgs are already compressed and tiffs look 
strange to the compression firmware) so 800GB is the reliable figure.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open

Given the value of your electronic library, some sort of archiving is a must 
and 
LTO is used for critical applications.  The tapes have an archival life of 
30 
years and given their relatively low cost you could have an electronic 
library 
safe and separate from your computers.

The tapes are very fast - 120MB/sec or in round numbers 1000x the speed of a 
T1 
line; as Jeff Moore put it: "The old-school way of putting this (which 
perhaps 
Brian might be the only other here to remember) is 'Don't underestimate the
bandwidth of a station wagon full of magtapes.'"

Best,

John

PS I've used this sort of equipment for 25 years, starting with and still 
using 
DLT, and it works as advertised.  LTO will likely supercede DLT and has the 
advantage of hardware encryption which is more important for data than most 
images although one can imagine images which need secure encryption.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Linear_Tape

Tina Manley wrote:
> At 02:35 PM 8/1/2009, you wrote:
>> I bought a gadget which is to all intents and purposes a hard drive
>> connector on one end of a cable, a USB connector on the other and a
>> power supply, I found it easy to remove my hard drive from its case,
>> plugged everything and there was my data. Not a permanent installation
>> but great for this sort of situation, though repairing the USB socket
>> in the existing case is another option.
>> I used to use this connector for backups to bare hard drives, but it
>> was a bit clunky so it is for emergency use only now.
>> Google should find one near you.
>> good luck,
>> Frank
> 
> Thanks, Frank, I'll Google it.  I took the hard drive out of the case 
> but it doesn't mate up to any of the SATA enclosures that I have.  Mine 
> are pretty old.  The USB socket had been soldiered in two tiny places 
> and that's what broke loose.  I called the nearest computer repair place 
> and asked about having it soldiered back on, but the guy (who called me 
> Honey) said that would ruin the motherboard and my computer.  I 
> explained that it was an external hard drive but he said he didn't do 
> that kind of work and didn't know anybody who did. :-(   I'll look for 
> the connector.
> 
> Tina
> 
> Tina Manley
> www.tinamanley.com
> 
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