On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Ross Vandegrift wrote: > around, I'm not sure if I wanna spring the $200 for a pair of 120G+ > drives. But we all know I'll regret getting something smaller. [...] > Does anyone here have some other clever solutions to getting > reliable archives of recordings? My ardour sessions, even for demos I'm just thinking of getting a new pair of 80GB drives (best 'GB per euro' ratio ;)). 80GB won't last forever, but not a huge problem if you have a usable archive/backup system. (*) What I've done is to buy a USB-IDE rack (I have one A-Link model, works pretty nicely, although sometimes freezes the kernel if in SMP mode :(). This allows me to mount my old IDE drives (and there's a lot of them) as backup drives, and thanks to USB I can do this without having to shutdown the system. And even the oldest drives (2.5GB bigfoot still working) are bigger than CDs and DVDs. As the drives are not physically connected while not used, data is safe from software/user errors, disk space is cheap (less than one euro/dollar per GB). And much more practical to use than burnable CD/DVDs. (*) For personal use I prefer to use manual-rsync mirroring instead of RAID. Usually when I've lost data, the cause was software errors (me working on or testing kernel drivers) or a user error. RAID won't help in these cases, but semi-automatic rsync-mirroring most often will... -- http://www.eca.cx Audio software for Linux!