Podcast suggestion - digital file preservation

[Marko]

Wow tape eh? I've not used it but it's very old school and supposedly VERY reliable but slow.

BTW - I blogged about backups about 10 months ago and got some good comments in case people are interested.
http://www.photography.ca/blog/?p=72

[Greg_Nuspel]

For me speed isn't a big deal the backup can run overnight. I like the reliability of the system.

[AcadieLibre]

I work off three external drives, two are kept at home and are duplicates of just music and photos, anything else I can replace. The 3rd is kept in a safety deposit box that is brought home every 3 to 4 weeks and is backup with what the the current drives have had added to them. Then the that day or the next it goes back to the safety deposit box.

I have had numerous set ups with varying amount of hard drives but this is my current set up, 3 tb drive each with 2 500 gb in each case has two drives should one drive fail. It may sound a bit over done but I have lost a drive before and lost minimal amount because I keep all my old drives and they are stored, if not I would have lost all my family photos. If you have a fire, flood and all your back ups are at your home what good are they. Looking to increase drives to 2 TB soon.

Once you get the set up going it is just time to upgrade to bigger back ups. I never format old drives and just store them, and I never give them away, after a several years I take a hammer to them and destroy them in little pieces. I donate the rest of the parts of my old computers but my HD's are never are given away. I believe in overkill in Data Back up, once SSD become affordable that will be how I will go, I would never trust a CD, DVD with anything I consider valuable. To unreliable.

[AntZ]

This is the setup that works for me. I have a folder on my desktop pc mapped to my notebook and set as an "Offline Folder". When I take my images of CF card in Lightroom it puts the images in this offline folder, windows automatically syncs these folders. This means I have access to my photos on my notebook if I am at home or not. When I am away from home, new images get put in the offline folder and then sync next time I am at home. In actual fact I almost never use the home desktop.
I also then use SyncToy2 to copy the files from my desktop to a network drive(NAS). The sync relationship is set to not copy deletions, so if I delete(on purpose or accident) a file in my original folder it is not deleted on the backup.

This is for my images only. I use lightroom which has a catalogue file which should also be backed up since that is where all my edits are stored. Problem is that Lightroom will not allow you to store your catalogue on a network drive. So every now and then I copy the catalogue file to my home pc manually. This is the only thing I need to do manually.

Of course apart from when my notebook is not at home, this is not off site backup, and if my house burned down I'd loose the lot. I do occasionally burn to DVD and leave off site.

[jellotranz]

Raid... Well running raid 5 which is stiping with parity will save you against a single disk failure.. In theory. We had a Dell raid array.. 14 drives.. one day it marked 8 disks bad and munches all the data on the disk subsystem when it attempted to rebuild the raid.. NOT GOOD.

Best option, 2 USB 1 terabyte drives, and just mirror the data from one to the other, then unplug the backup disk. Only plugin the backup disk when you are going to back it up. If you are running Vista robocopy will to a nice job of keeping the disks synced. This is how I do it.

/dev/md0 1.8T 971G 770G 56% /Photos
/dev/md1 1.8T 971G 770G 56% /Photo-backup