[Leica] World of pain

[rgacpa at yahoo.com (Bob Adler)]

Hi Alastair,
What an awful ordeal. I hope you didn't loose any images and just the LR 
catalogue (I couldn't really tell from the post).
I think having multiple catalogues is a great idea; one that I'll implement 
now 
that I've read your post.

I did a lot of thinking about data storage too. What is currently working 
for me 
(and I knock on wood?daily) is having directories for each year of 
photo's.?At 
the end of each year, I make a copy of that year's photos onto a hard drive 
(not 
WD as it seems to have some kind of proprietary code; I use G-Drives) and 
store 
it off site.

For current year images, before I copy them at the end of the year, I work 
on 
them locally; on?an external HDD via FW attached to my?Macbook Pro. Weekly I 
backup these files to another HDD kept off site. My prior year files are 
moved 
to a RAID storage device so that I can access them currently (remember the 
backups are kept off site). I also, at the end?of the year backup what's on 
the 
raid to a large HDD and keep off site.

So basically I end up with:
- Current year's files: on local HDD and on off site HDD backed up every few 
weeks.
- Prior year files: on local RAID, orignal HDD and cumulative HDD kept off 
site.

I'm hoping this is enough. Some day moving to the "cloud" may offer an 
additional form of redundancy, but for now it is too slow and too expensive 
for 
large quantities of RAW files. It would also help if I went through 
and?deleted 
a bunch of "loosers", but I never did that with negatives and am reticent to 
do 
that with files.

Good luck and let us know how it all turns out.
Bob
?Bob Adler
Palo Alto, CA
http://www.rgaphoto.com 




________________________________
From: "afirkin at afirkin.com" <afirkin at afirkin.com>
To: Leica Users Group <lug at leica-users.org>
Sent: Mon, July 19, 2010 5:38:25 AM
Subject: [Leica] World of pain

I know some of you will probably say: "the idiot deserves all he gets",
but boy am I in a 'world of pain'.

A month or so ago, my firewire RAID mirrored light room catelog was
becoming very full. I decided to back up the RAID disks by
1. copying the files onto another disk
2. removing one of the RAID disks and letting the RAID re-mirror the data
3. storing the now spare disk from the RAID in a safe place.

All sounded like "overkill", but I really wanted to 'get it right'. So
first phase, I bought 2 terabyte WD disks and installed them into my
firewire 800 WD my book to make a 1TB raid rather than my mirrored 500 gig
RAIDS. So far so good. I then "dropped" the files from "photoRaid1" onto
it copied the files overnight, and the next morning started the same
process for "photoRaid2". I removed the first my book Raid and replaced
one of the disks with a "clean" one and left it to "mirror" (said by wd to
take 8 hours or so).

Next day photoRaid2 was copied, and there was still a lot of space on the
1TB disk. Oh dear. I did a detailed check of the disk and found that
PhotoRaid1 had not fully copied across. No warning, just 'stopped' half
way in. No panic, I should now have 3 disks with the data. WRONG. The
mirror did not work. I should have panicked right then, but no, I replaced
the disk and fired up photoRaid1 again. BUT the mirroring or something had
corrupted the disks. The message said: you cannot now copy to this disk,
so we suggest you get the data off "quick" or words to that effect. I
tried, but could only find 80%. Now terrified, I sought professional help.
A week later the "pro" said he could not find anything on any of the 3
disks.

So much for RAID protection. Seems the mirroring is not as simple as I had
been led to believe. Since then, I've been DESPERATELY trying to find a
way to store my data safely. I've re-built the entire lightroom catelog of
55000 images onto an ethernet WD sharedisc 2TB RAID. Now I'm trying to
back up those files and the ethernet bank of disks has gone on a GO SLOW.
It took 10 minutes for it to even recognise that there were photos in the
folders, and it would not copy. So now, I'm desperately AND SLOWLY
exporting all the files off the ethernet RAID back onto firewire RAIDS.
Its so slow and I'm now so paranoid that my every waking moment is
consumed.

When I finally finish, I will have a new LR catelog, I will split that
into 3 main sub catelogs, and I will back it up on 200 disks ;-) well
perhaps not 200, but at this stage I would just love the copying of files
from one HD to another to go smoothly.

Sorry for the rant, but I have a lot of time at the moment sitting
watching it copy files to the next disk. I might even have time to read my
LUG mail.

Yours TOTALLY CONSUMED

Alastair


_______________________________________________
Leica Users Group.
See http://leica-users.org/mailman/listinfo/lug for more information