[Leica] Scanner Progress...... Back-up and NAS

[scheng at aotera.org (Spencer Cheng)]

Hi Tina,

On Oct 18, 2008, at 17:37, Tina Manley wrote:
>
> That helps immensely, Spencer.  At first reading, I think I probably  
> need a drobo.  I did have an enclosure for 4 disks but it didn't  
> include any kind of backup.  It was just a bunch of disks.  Those  
> are obsolete since they were about 200GB each. ;-) Now I have  
> several 1T and several more 750 GB, but they are all Seagate  
> FreeAgent external hard drives.  I'm backing them up with the  
> Seagate Memeo, which saved me $1900 when one drive failed.  It's  
> supposed to be totally automatic, but I don't entirely trust it  
> since I never know when it is working and when it is paused.  It had  
> paused and I had to reproduce one week of work but had the previous  
> 2 months saved.
>

I have couple of more thoughts for you. Companies having fancy backups  
schemes and tools. About 10 years, we used to back up to magnetic  
tapes for offsite storage which has it's own problems. Namely, you  
don't really know the tape is any good or not.

Brian has suggested in the past to use disks stored in a cool dry  
place. This is not a bad scheme but you may need store a stack of  
disks else where. It is the best of the lot for offsite storage.

DVD's are not suitable for archival storage.

How much data do you have all together?

If I were paranoid, I would suggest using 2 NAS on your home network  
and the NAS backs each other up.

> Now Peter Krogh (DAM book author) is saying that you should keep two  
> catalogs of everything - one in Lightroom and another in a more  
> robust catalog software like Expression Media.  GRRRR.!!  I had  
> everything in Expression Media (formerly iView) and switched to  
> Lightroom.  If I have to keep two catalogs of everything, I'll have  
> to double my storage space.  This is all getting to be ridiculous.   
> I'm beginning to like my file cabinets of negatives and slides ;-)
>

The problem with long term digital media storage is the need to be  
converted periodically to the current format/metadata. This is the  
problem the libraries and archives are facing today. The digital  
version of the Doomsday book wasn't readable for quite a few years  
until they found some ancient H/W which can read it.

Regards,
Spencer