[Leica] Consensus on external hard drives

[henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)]

At 12:37 PM +0100 8/4/06, Simon Ogilvie wrote:
>Phew!  Reading this makes me want to go back to using film! ;-)
>
>Simon.
>
>
>On 7/21/06, Henning Wulff <henningw@archiphoto.com> wrote:
>>
>>Beyond my own needs I've been involved in helping others set up
>>backup/archive systems.
>>
>>My main machine, a Mac, has a 120Gb startup drive and two fast 80Gb
>>drives striped RAID drives for Photoshop's use for swap files (and
>>some very large interim files) and firewire drives for image storage.
>>At present 300Gb drives are in the sweet spot for capacity/dollar
>>here, so that is what I get. I put them into inexpensive third party
>>(firewire) enclosures, and everything works fine. I generally use
>>Seagate drives, as I've had a lot more failed Western Digital and
>>Maxtor on a percentage basis, and others are generally not cost
>>effective here. This is based on about 100 drives over the past 3
>>years. Not a huge number, but good enough for me.
>>
>>I have used and have experience with about 6 LaCie drives/enclosures.
>>The mechanisms are mostly Western Digital (see above) and three of
>>the enclosures have had failures of one sort or another, a far higher
>>percentage than the other enclosures. I like the look of the LaCie,
>>but not the reliability.
>>
>>I generally have one current drive with images on line. I back that
>>up regularly to a similarly sized second drive (I use a utility
>>called DejaVu, but there are others that work - NOT Silverkeeper
>>which tends to drop files). The file structure is identical on all
>>drives except for the jpegs and scans (see below). The second drive
>>only gets fired up to do a backup. A third drive also gets a backup,
>>but this one is used via Adobe's DNG converter (I shoot almost
>>exclusively RAW) so that I have another format. I also put the jpegs,
>>scans etc in another folder. When a set of three drives is full, I
>>bring one to my wife's office and keep the DNG drive in a fireproof
>>safe. The third drive gets used when I need photos from that drive,
>>and it gets kept connected (but powered down) at my computer. My
>>catalog resides on my main drive, and is done with iView. My main
>>drive also gets backed up automatically daily, and manually to
>>another drive once a week. The RAID setup doesn't get backed up.
>>
>>I've had too many experiences with unreadable CD's and DVD's to trust
>>them for long term storage.
>>
>>--
>>    *            Henning J. Wulff
>>   /|\      Wulff Photography & Design

:-)  :-)  :-)  :-)  :-)

Yes, it sounds like a lot. However, if you think about the time you 
need to file and maintain (without any backup except prints made) 
film, in slide, B&W negative and colour negative form for multiple 
formats, the digital stuff takes up a small fraction of the time 
considering the number of images.

Scanning can be used for backup, but then you got the whole digital 
archiving thing again, and the files are a lot bigger for a given 
quality level than RAW format.

And if my house burns down, I still have most of my images.

-- 
    *            Henning J. Wulff
   /|\      Wulff Photography & Design
  /###\   mailto:henningw@archiphoto.com
  |[ ]|     http://www.archiphoto.com