[Leica] World of pain

[tgray at 125px.com (Tim Gray)]

On Jul 19, 2010 at 08:38 AM -0400, afirkin at afirkin.com wrote:
> I know some of you will probably say: "the idiot deserves all he gets",
> but boy am I in a 'world of pain'.

Sorry to hear about your experiences.  Hopefully you didn't lose too much.

Personally, from what I've heard/read/know, I would not look at Time 
Machine/RAID/Drobos, etc., as anything other than conveniences.  Yes, they 
are great for certain things, and can be used as an *extra* layer of backup, 
but I would not rely on them as the main safety net.  Wonderfully convenient 
until the Drobo or Time Machine decides to shit the bed and corrupts your 
backup.  For that you just need plain old redundancy.  As many backup copies 
as you can, stored on different devices.

If you use a Mac, try SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner.  Mirror your main 
drives to 1, 2, or even 3 backup copies.  Backup every night.  Rotate 
offsite every week or so.

There's a lot of utilities out there to do incremental backups too. 
SuperDuper will do smart backups, only copying changed files, but it still 
treats the process as mirroring a whole drive.  If you want to delve into 
something like rsync or rdiff-backup, you can cobble together a script to 
backup certain important folders (your image libraries) incrementally very 
quickly.  To remote systems too.

If you really want to get into it, buy a second computer setup with 
something like Linux just for backups.  Have your main computer backup to 
the backup computer once a night.  Have the backup computer mirror its data 
to backup drives, taking the load off the main computer.

You can also look into LTO tape backups.  I think they are still around.

If you are a professional and can afford it, maybe hire a computer 
consultant to design a backup system for you.