I have three externals. First a Verbatim Firewire 400 320G pocket
drive for Time Machine (Apple's built-in automatic continuous HD
backup app). Even with an 80G hard drive it's way too small. I've
had it for 5 months or so and there are only 67G left.
Second an OtherWorld Computing Firewire 800 2T for my master files.
I bought it a couple months ago and it failed quickly. They replaced
it immediately, with a shipping coupon for me to return the failed
drive when I'd completed the copying. (It would mount about 20% of
the time). The drive itself was not the problem, but all the ports
on the case were intermittent. I've had the replacement for a month
now and all is well.
Finally, over in my storage area I have an old ~150M Firewire 400
drive which had not failed but was too small for my master files. It
is now a bootable backup.
I bought a 500M drive on eBay a couple years ago, Firewire 400. It
served well until it was nearly full and then one day blithely
announced that it was not working any more. After some
experimentation I determined that it would no longer permit me to
write to it, but I could read just fine. I have forgotten which
brand of drive was in it. It was a home brew by some enterprising
unemployed person who opened an eBay store and assembled such things
from parts and sold them.
The quality of the drives in these cases varies wildly, as far as I
can tell. If you read the gossip sheets online (my favorite is my
Mac-L) you will discover that there is no concensus about which
vendor makes the shabbiest drives. However, Mac users generally have
not had good experiences with LaCie drives, or with Iomega drives.
In addition to using a HD for backup and quick access I also maintain
2 folders on my desktop - origs and keepers. Everything is placed in
them until they reach DVD capacity and then they are burned to 2 sets
of DVDs One set is kept here (because my external drive only has my
keepers on it and the DVDs have my original captures on them as
well). The other set lives with my old bootable backup drive off
site.
The only origs I discard are those which fail for either artistic or
technical reasons. I may discard identical shots if one is not level
and the other one is, for instance. I will discard anything that's
soft or poorly composed or an unattractive accident.
My last step is to catalog the DVDs with a small app called CDFinder.
This displays all the files, allows me to search by keywords,
filename, foldername, date, etc. etc. and tells me which DVD I can
find the file on.
About 8 months ago I retrieved all my old CDs and DVDs from the
storage area and organized them and reburned them onto DVDs. Many of
the old scans had not been dated, keyworded and captioned. It was a
very tiresome thing to be doing.
Things are in better order now.
--
Emily L. Ferguson
mailto:elf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
508-563-6822
New England landscapes, wooden boats and races
http://www.landsedgephoto.com
Check out my Spring daily photograph project at:
http://tinyurl.com/3a6m7g6
And Summer:
http://tinyurl.com/3a6m7g6
