[Leica] Consensus on external hard drives

[datamaster at northcoastphotos.com (Gary Todoroff)]

While my main storage  for photos uses RAID 5 on a server, I use 
cheap IDE drives for backup. They are various sizes from 80GB  up to 
250GB and are in removable hard drive trays. With the shareware 
program, XXCOPY, unattended backups are easy. I can't "hotswap" the 
IDE trays, but it's easy to take off where the backup left off  - 
turn off the computer. insert another HD tray and startup again. 
Recovery from the backup drives is easy because the files are all in 
the same folder/directory structure as on the server - no proprietary 
file formats to mess with.

The best part is that the entire backup of everything is on one set 
of three external hard drives that I keep offsite - no weird filing 
systems to keep track of or dozens of tapes or CDs to store. If 
anyone wants to know more about XXCOPY and the batch files that 
automate the backup, let me know!

Gary Todoroff
(Tree Lugger)