On 24-Oct-10 15:17, Don Roberts wrote:
I know you all have computers or you would not be on this list. I assume most of you also use accessory external hard drives. I have had a run of really bad results with those things lately. I have had 3 go down completely and another get too squirrely to trust. All within about a year. Has anyone else run into more problems than normal? I am buying what seem to be good brands. Is cloud computing the answer? It gets to be taxing to keep transferring large photo files to other drives.
It's complicated. The environment (heat) could be an issue, possibly. Other than that, if bad luck follows you around, I don't know why.
I haven't had a hard drive go bad on me in over a decade, so far as I can remember. There are 12 of them plus two SSD drives within arm's reach of where I sit currently, so it's not like there aren't drives available to fail!
I'm running a disk storage server (basically, I've built something a bit like a Drobo using commodity hardware and Open Solaris and the ZFS filesystem). All the disks are mirrored, and ZFS keeps checksums on every block of information. I have it check all the blocks on both copies of the disks weekly (that's one simple command, "zfs scrub zp1", which I have issued automatically by crond each week). I do all my work on this drive; I don't keep data on my desktop computer, I access it from the network server. This is a mild speed penalty, but I don't mind it. Bibble still renders full-size 100% quality jpegs at under 5 seconds per NEF file (Nikon D700, 12MP). I also take frequent snapshots of the state, and ZFS keeps all these together and straight, without duplicating any data that's the same.
Then I back up to external USB drives (also using ZFS). A full backup takes over 6 hours currently (because USB is so slow; if I had eSATA external drives it'd be immensely faster), but I'm in sight of being able to do incremental backups, which will bring the time down to seconds most days (except the days I bring in many gigabytes of new images!).
I rotate one of the drives out of the house frequently (currently to a desk drawer at work); so a house fire or flood won't lose most of my images (except for the old film images).
I'm still making optical disks to take off-site as well (to my sister's house).
Yeah, basically it's a lot of trouble to keep a digital archive in decent shape. On the other hand, so far as I know I've never lost a digital image, going back to the first one a friend shot out in Massachusetts when I was visiting in...1989 I think it was (a Sony Mavica, it recorded on floppy disks).
-- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b@xxxxxxxx; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
