[Leica] Tape backup?

[spencer at aotera.org (Spencer Cheng)]

Ah, I did forget one important detail. 

The only archival storage medium available for images are analog, namely 
paper and microfiche. Nothing else is known to last for 100+ years by the 
National Archive of Canada. So either print your pictures on archival paper 
with archival ink and store them properly or learn to like your images to be 
very small and at very high contrast. :))

For backup, you can of course enrol in the print exchange. ;-)

Regards,
Spencer

On Dec 16, 2012, at 11:18, Spencer Cheng <spencer at aotera.org> wrote:

> Richard,
> 
> To add my belated $0.10 worth. :(
> 
> Tapes has similar problems as HDDs. Unless you exercise them regularly, 
> you aren't gonna to know they are broken until you need the backup.
> 
> After a couple of discussions with a friend who use to be the Linux HDD 
> driver maintainer and creator of hdparms (if you know what that is, you 
> are way too close to the metal :), I have abandoned RAID-5 in my NAS and 
> gone with software-based RAID-1 for the simple reason that RAID-5 (and 
> anything that looks or smell like RAID-5) will work less and less well as 
> disks gets bigger and bigger. This applies to all NAS's including Drobo. 
> The reason is a bit complicated but it comes down to the probability of a 
> transient failure during the recovery phase is too high for large disks. 
> Forget hardware-based RAID - same problem plus more.
> 
> If you really want to make sure your data is safe, rotate a copy (disk, 
> tape, whatever) to somewhere geographically different. The keyword here is 
> 'rotate', i.e. You *must* reuse the storage media regularly to know when 
> it has failed.
> 
> I am sticking with disks until either LTO drives come down in price or I 
> get rich. :)
> 
> As for obsolescence, it's gonna to happen doesn't matter which digital 
> medium you store the data. Get use to it and deal with it. If it can 
> happen to the Doomsday Book and the Apollo video tapes, it's going to 
> happen to us. You will have to transcribe all your data to a different 
> generation of storage and S/W technology every 10-15 years.
> 
> I was at an MPEG standards meeting recently and had an interesting 
> conversation with the guy from NIST who is driving the digital media 
> archival storage problem. No magic solution in sight yet and not likely to 
> be. It will always require work.
> 
> As Tina found out, cloud storage is wonderful unless you have lots of data 
> to upload. The initial upload is always the killer. Best done via Fedex. :(
> 
> Regards,
> Spencer
> 
> On Dec 15, 2012, at 19:26, Richard Man <richard at richardmanphoto.com> 
> wrote:
> 
>> OK!
>> 
>> Thanks all for the advice on and off list.
>> 
> 
> 
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