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02/05/07- A good topic for our first ever photo tip--- BACKUP 101- Thought I might pass this along as this subject matter is something I am dealing with right now and expounding about it briefly (or not so briefly) here might save someone out there a little grief in the future. In this age of computers and digital workflow, many are quick to embrace new digital technology for many factors, ie. instant results, quickness of turnaround, not having to deal with processing and large exposure capacity on memory cards as compared to the small amount on print film are just some of the many reasons. I am one that have exclusively shot digital for the past few years now, and have found very few down sides in this new format. However, today, I just found out that the past year's work that was on a 500 GB drive (packed full of data) has irrecoverable damage on the drive and NONE of the data can be restored. I am one of those people who is always in a hurry and will think about backing up my data later. As a matter of fact, the day this drive crashed, I had just done about four hours research on how the heck I was going to implement a good backup system for all this data. After researching and subsequently reading about how unreliable my drive was, I went to turn the drive on, and like a bad dream it wouldn't boot up, just a few scratching sounds and then a blinking light.... not a good sign. The timing was haunting. So I had a local guy look at it, he couldn't do anything,, then sent the drive to a clean room lab, and they said it was totally trashed,, actually both disks in the drive failed at the same time. If the lab would have been able to recover the data, I would have been looking at a $1500 bill- which we decided we were willing to pay as we felt the data was that important. Some places wanted upwards of $5k to recover the data.. So, long story short, I have now learned all about raid arrays, which I suggest everyone do some research on. Bottom line, if you want redundancy, raid 0 data striping is a bad thing. That is how my drive was set up because I was in the mindset that I need capacity and speed because of large files, I'll back up later. Bad mindset when you make a living off of a library of digital images. However, raid 1 probably would have made no difference as both disks failed at the same time and were unreadable. I am at a loss as to what to do to preserve images. Putting images on a couple drives will not guarantee image preservation for any length of time. DVD's are useless to me because they are less reliable than hard drives and I need large amounts of storage space. Through this, I have learned that hard drives can fail at any time for no reason at all and there were no symptoms that drive failure was imminent. Up to this point, I have been using computers for a good 10 years and never had a drive failure. This is a hard lesson to learn when it is a tremendous amount of work up in smoke in an instant, by far my most important drive ever. No excuses, backups are absolutely essential and it's incredibly stupid that I was not backing up on at least a weekly basis. The thing is, I am about ready to pop over the fact that I pay good money for a 500gb drive expecting it to work for awhile... hopefully more than a year *%!!!!!???!!!! and it seems rather absurd after talking to data restoration techs that it's quite a common thing for drives to fail a lot sooner than mine did. So what are we supposed to do,,, have drives stacked to the ceiling to safeguard against data loss, replacing them every couple years if they make it that long???? YOU BETCHA! Sooooooooooo.... I have come to the conclusion that I'm going to have to create a triple redundancy system in order to sleep at night. At this point I am changing my way of doing things in the order of: #1. download files to two separate drives, both
drives configured in raid 1(which means I will actually be creating
4 copies of the file) #2. upload significant files to an offsite storage server- this is a good idea as companies that store data have redundancy as well and keep their drives fresh as they have to do everything possible to minimize loss of data. This will create quadruple redundancy. Also, when backing up to let's say an external drive, it's not a good thing to fill up the disk and leave it sit on the shelf for a year or two. You risk the drive freezing up and having a hardware failure. Am I going overboard? maybe...... but, as with everything else, once it's gone, it's gone. I don't want to ever have to go thru this again.
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