Posts
At the beginning of the year I wrote about New Years Resolutions, one of which was to back up all my raw files. I'd made DVD backups of all the processed images but not the original files, and with technology improving, it made sense to back up the original data. It was fairly simple to purchase an external firewire 500 gig drive, plug it in, connect it and simply drag all the folders across to the backup drive. Before I did that I actually attempted to do a search for all the CR2 and CRW suffix images thinking that I could do the backup in one step - for some reason my Mac wouldn't let me do that. After I realized that having thousands of raw images, none with any tag explaining which shoot they came from, would have been a nightmare. Now they simply reside in the folders which are labelled with the shoot - even this could be problematic and I look forward to using Lightroom to edit the metadata so I can also do a search by keyword.
Anyway, the drive is now unplugged. 4 years of raw files took up less than half the drive, and even lightning isn't going to damage it. As a physician with an electronic medical record - I get information about destroying old computer drives containing patient records - it's not enough to erase the drives, they want holes drilled through the platter, and not just one. I suspect that even if the drive fails, the data could be ressurected by a data retrieval company, all be it at considerable cost. I understand that the magnetic data on the disk will last many years (but not forever) and that unplugged and unused, it isn't going to deteriorate like DVD's and CD's seem to do. Also, it took a hell of a lot less time than burning dozens of DVD's.
Of course, I also have a similarly unplugged hard disk containing backups of my processed images, as well as DVD's of those in a different building - so I figure I'm reasonably safe. Fingers crossed!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Good topic George. I think almost everyone can relate to images that...somehow...disappeared.
Earlier this year I lost 2gb worth of raw photos when a hard drive crashed the morning after I downloaded the shoot from a CF card. Normally, I save a second copy of the raw files immediately, but I was excited by what I had shot and started working a few pix as soon as I saw the previews. The next evening, the hard drive crashed on startup, and as (bad) luck would have it, I had already shot over the files on that same CF card.
I learned two lessons. First, ALWAYS make a back up copy FIRST! No exceptions. Second, rotate CF cards rather than use the same one, as I had grown accustomed to...just in case a recovery is in order.
I have recently made an addition to my computer (PC) that should help alleviate some of those headaches. I added a hard drive and used it to configure my startup drive (c:) into a "RAID 1" (redundant) array, which simultaneously records two drives with identical information. If one fails, the other automatically takes over.
I now store all of my raw and print files on the startup drive (since they are automatically immediately backed up), as well as on a pair of external drives which I rotate to an off-site location, similar to what George does.
The RAID 1 configuration actually increases read speed since both disks act together, but does add about 20% to the write time. Well worth it, though, in my opinion, for the extra layer of security.
Chuck
Hard drives are cheap and fast for backups, so I've never understood why people bother with current 4/8gb DVDs. With the arrival of blu-ray @ 50GB and potential for 40Mb/sec in a few years, DVDs might become interesting. But for now IMHO it doesn't make sense to use anything other than hard drives.
Mike
A good piece of software if you are running windows, Synctoy from Microsoft, does a superb job of syncing between drives or directories, many options, easy to use, and free. It was designed with photographers in mind.
Holes drilled in the platter reminded me of an earlier time...
At Irwin Magnetics, once the worlds' largest manufacturer of mini-cartridge tape backup drives for IBM PCs, Macs, Novell servers, et al., one of the favorite demos we used to do at Comdex as to take a tape cartridge and punch holes in the tape with a tape punch, then put the cartridge in the drive and recover the data.
Most modern media has a lot of redundancy built in to the formatting, usually based on Reed-Solomon error code correction or some such. In Irwin's case, for every 16 sectors of data written on the tape, an additional two sectors containing enough data to recover the information from as much as any two of the total 18 sectors was added, essentially making the data bullet-proof from must about anything short of demagnetizing or heavily mangling the tape.
I could see where drilling a couple of holes in hard drive platters might make it hard to float heads over the spinning platters, but I'd think that most of the data on the drive, even in the areas containing the holes, could be recovered, given some mechansism to replace the normally delicate had assemblies.
Post a Comment