Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2008/04/05
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]I don't know about that in real practice... I've been using raid drives for over 7 years for everything digital that I have "in process". Almost every year, one of the mirrored drives fails.... At which point, I'm replacing both drives and that has been expensive over time. If money is no object and you have the IT guys to maintain and back stuff up.... it's a different story. Whereas Mama/Mitsui Archive CD's - 100 plus years Mama/Mitsui Archive DVD's - 50 plus years Sure you are going to have to migrate things at some point..... but I wouldn't have much confidence in any hard drive array still working in 10 years, let alone 50 or a 100. Of course, by that time things will be stored on a different media anyhow. But, using multiple archival media allows me to store images in two (or 3) seperate places which virtually eliminates the risk to fire or disasters. We had a near disaster a couple of weeks ago with our server room getting flooded from a leak on the roof... fortunately there was no data loss on the network.... But the network was down for most of the week and I personally find it just too slow for converting and working with raw files. I'm now using a 1 tb raid disk on my desk, which is about full. My fear is that someday, someone is going to see it and walk off with it. Or just as bad if both drives got fried simultaneously. I'd just as soon not have everything in the same place. The average joe digital photographer, especially if they work with a laptop, is lucky if they have more than one hard drive. I think backing stuff up onto quality optical media still makes sense for the vast majority of users. It also is a lot easier to send to another location..... I just sent 47gb of images on 10 DVD's... I can't really ftp that... and I don't want to send a hard drive.... Duane ( I really don't want to risk losing my digital photos) Birkey ************************************* Wade wrote: Hey, Duane, That will never happen. The thinking is that optical media is just too instable for long term archives. The "best practice" recommendation according to the experts on media storage is multiple redundant hard drives (optimally a RAID or like device). Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.