[pure-silver] Re: Film vs Digital- was: Amusing Kodak commercial
- From: "Dana H. Myers" <dana.myers@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: pure-silver@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2006 17:37:47 -0800
Edward C. Zimmermann wrote:
> Dana,
>
> It seems that you suggest you know something that the gang I know at
> LOC and most of the National Libraries don't..
Are you using sarcasm? That'd be a first on the Internet :-)
> Quoting "Dana H. Myers" <dana.myers@xxxxxxxxx>:
>
>>> The problem of the longivity of the image has not been solved in the
>>> digital imaging realm.
>> I completely disagree. You need to think like a data archivist and
>> not a photographer to understand.
>
> RAID is NOT the answer..
A single RAID array _alone_ is not the anwer, sure. Replicating data
across a diverse set of fault domains, however, *is* the answer.
This is exactly what I mean by thinking like a data archivist - with
data, you can make any number of replicas of the data without degrading it.
You're interested in preserving the data, not the media on which the data
is stored - in fact, you're preserving the data *despite* the media.
So you get clever about replicating the data to improve the odds against
loss.
A single RAID array can give better reliability than a single disk, but
it's still a single point of failure - as you've observed. Configuring
multiple RAID boxes so you can tolerate the failure of an entire box is
an improvement; interconnecting multiple geographically-diverse collections
of RAID boxes is better still.
Do you achieve perfection this way? Is the data totally safe? No, but the
odds of losing data - digitally-stored images - quickly become far smaller
than the odds of losing a single negative stored in a house.
Sure, this means that no single one of us is in the position to create
such sophisticated configurations. That's why I mention leaving it to
the professionals, like Amazon S3 or Strongspace.
Cheers,
Dana
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