Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2005/07/27
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Tina, I don't have the level of expertise that Brian has with his prior employer but when I setup the IT operation for a small company of about 30 people, a few years ago, this is what I did. You can take a simplified, less paranoid version of this. - every 2 hours, synchronize all changes to another disk on the same machine. - every night, synchronize all changes to a separate disk on a different machine on the same network - every week, back up all the data to an offline disk/tape. HD is preferred over tape or CD/DVD as HD has more error checking/recovery capability. Tape is usually unreliable unless one is willing to spend a lot of money on tape drives and tapes. Cheap tapes and drives are useless. CD/DVD are easy to damage. It is also much easier and faster to check a HD for consistency. Rotate the backup media and take 1 set out of service every month as your monthly backup. - every month dump all the data onto a tape/HD and store it offsite. Rotate backup media over period of 1 year. Lastly, but certainly not leastly, double check all your backups for integrity. Make sure you can restore the data from the backup at least once every few months. [Plus all the other items that Brian has advocated over the last few years - unplug & disconnect the drives when not in use,...] Most of the hourly/daily backups can be automated. Retrospect and various other packages are available. The cost of all the backup media does add up but hard disks are pretty cheap these days (250GB external disk is about USD$200) and the cost of recovery can be very high - if it is possible even to recover from loss of digital masters. /sc On Jul 27, 2005, at 10:32, Tina Manley wrote: > > Yes. I back everything up every Friday night. The computer > crashed on a Wednesday so I lost all of the work that I had done on > a video for 5 days. I'm working on redoing that now. The other > external hard drive that had the back-up of my photos is the LaCie > that failed. I used a recovery program on it and got several > thousand photo files - all of the tiffs are corrupt. The jpegs > show up, but I hadn't done any work on those and only used them for > reference. I've learned my lesson and will be backing up more > often when I'm working on an important project. I have made two > sets of DVDs of my photos from 4 countries so far - only 40 > countries to go! >