Gary,Years ago I opted to "pay the freight" for an optical cartridge drive for backups. That worked for a few years but they became extinct and I then opted for tape backup (VXA-2) which I still use and recommend as one of the industry's leading small business and personal backup standards.
Tape drives are, as you said, expensive, but considering the expense of my Leica cameras and lenses, my travel expenses, and the value of my attachment to old photos I've scanned and saved, it is a small price to pay, IMHO.
I have my digital photo files: 1. On an exclusive-use internal HD, i.e., photos only, for daily use,2. Saved daily with Retrospect on one of two Firewire HDs, one of which is stored off-site, and which are swapped monthly, and which are recycled about every six months,
3. Saved semi-annually with Retrospect on one of two sets of VXA-2 tapes, one set of which is stored off-site, and which are recycled about every couple years or more
The external HDs are relatively inexpensive these days, the tape drive and their cartridges are not, but the safety factor and demonstrated longevity of the tape is "priceless" to me.
All the best, Bill On Feb 5, 2009, at 6:45 PM, Gary E wrote:
David,I've been in the IT field for some time now, so I can tell you it is a safer bet to use either Raid 1, Raid 5 or Raid 6 if you want to have redundancy or protection from lost data. It does cost a bit more to have a PC retrofitted with the additional drives, but CD and DVD's are not a great way to archive information; no business I know uses this method. The only other method we use to archive data is the backup tape. Not many people I know including myself uses that method at home; it's archaic and tape drives can be expensive.Gary E------------------------------ Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2009 14:41:42 -0800 From: David Young <dsy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Subject: [LRflex] Breathing easier, now. Fellow Flexers:Recently we had a discussion, here, about digital workflow, and making >backups.Today, a DVD burned in 2005 proved unreadable. I went to the backup disc and it too was unreadable. I then went to my archived DVD and although it proved difficult toread, it was readable after about 2 to 3 minutes of hunting, by the drive.I have now copied it to HD and from there back to 3 new DVDs. All read-back perfectly. In this case, I do not suspect any problem with the Fuji discs, butrather with the older, now gone, DVD writer, which I had previously used.Still, it proves the need for good backup procedures, with multiple backups. If you have only one backup, such an outboard HD, you might well be "in the glue", should that fail. I hope none of you ever suffer such a fate, with your photos. Cheers! --- David Young, Logan Lake, CANADA Limited Edition Prints at: www.furnfeather.net Personal Web-site at: www.main.furnfeather.net------ Unsubscribe or change to/from Digest Mode at: http://www.lrflex.furnfeather.net/ Archives are at: //www.freelists.org/archives/leicareflex/
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