I find what you have related to be very important. It has reminded me once again that I need to find a way to back up and store my information. Thank you. Shyrell -- Melara Family Photography Preserving Precious Memories Aaron Reece said: > I work in desktop computer technical support for a large university as my > "day job." I always tell my users, based on a decade of > experience, that hard drive failure is not a question of "if," it is a > question of "when." I've seen enough of these go south that I do not trust > anything truly important or irreplaceable to a single hard drive. The most > recent one happened two weeks ago - the professor in question had just > finished typing up a whole semester's worth of lectures. After determining > that the HDD electronics were ruined, I asked about any backups she might > have. "Backups, you say?" Ouch. > > One of the biggest advantages of removable media such as CD and DVD is the > fact that you can get the storage medium physically separated from your > computer. So multiple backups can be made and stored in multiple > (off-site) locations. It's highly unlikely that your house and your office > or place of work will catch fire the same night. > > One more thing to ponder before throwing out your optical media > writer is the changing nature of HDD interfaces. While the IDE and SCSI > (physical) interfaces have remained reasonably constant, SATA, USB, and > FireWire interfaces have arrived within the past few years to unseat them > as technology continues its inexorable march of > progress (he writes with an uncharacteristically low level of irony). How > convenient will it be in 15 years to extract the contents of your 300GB > IDE HDD? (You did say "long term archiving.") To get some idea, try > finding a service today that will extract the contents of a MFM/ RLL drive. > Try finding someone who even knows what that is. Or how about the parallel > port drives that were popular in the days before USB and FireWire. The > ports may still be on new computers, but try finding drivers for your OS > to mount the drives. > > Of course, HDDs offer great speed and convenience compared to optical > media, and the backup you made (or that can be fully automated) is better > than the one you never get around to, so personally I use both, a weekly > HDD backup to a FireWire HDD and a monthly (if I can get around to it) > backup on DVD-R media. If I had a slightly larger budget for digital > photography I would probably just buy another FireWire HDD and keep it in > my office in case of fire or other > catastrophe. For now the DVD-Rs are working fine. > > I apologize for this long and rambling post on a wholly un- > aesthetics-related topic. > > -Aaron Reece > Oswego, NY, USA
