Comments on: More Tech Meltdown

By: juli

juli — Thu, 01 Sep 2005 04:46:59 +0000

Bought an 100 gig drive on sale to supplement my last Dell’s 60 gig. Cracked the case to find there was not room to add an additional internal hard drive. Got lazy and never made it external. Ended up adding it to my new Dell (which had tons of room for more drives) and I image the entire C:\ drive to it on a weekly basis.

Anything I can’t possibly stand to lose between images goes on CD.

By: sog

sog — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 20:10:18 +0000

Being a bit anal myself (after losing about 600 megs of my oldest digital pics from the 1.2 megapixel days) — I have gone with 4 200 GB Hard Drives. 2 are used in RAID mirroring leaving me 200 gig usable. The other 2 are swapped in and out of an external enclosure unit to do full backups.

1 of which is always in the external unit and the other in my desk drawer at work (offsite).

By: impy

impy — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 13:18:05 +0000

“Bob says:

I read not that recently about using an old tower to build a scsi disc array where you could implement any of the raid configurations that you deem appropriate. Using striping will give you a hot-swappable capability and allow the replaced disc to rebuild itself.”

Why does this post sound so sexual? A lack of knowledge and understanding leaves the mind open to random interpretation. It sounds like a plan for a panty raid and something about swapping hot wives that take their clothes off to music,,,I dunno.

By: Heron

Heron — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 10:13:36 +0000

Backup, backup, backup…. The sadly ignored tech mantra. I have nearly 10 years worth of digital pics to lose, so after I lost 3 months worth of digital baby pics of my daughter in 2001, I have been in quest of the perfect backup scheme.

Here’s what I have come up with: Our laptops (2) backup docs and email daily to a central file server with about a half-terabyte of storage. Then super-critical files, i.e. digital pics, email, client files, are backed up daily to a 300-gig external HD. About once a month I burn the latest batch of pics to DVD and take it to my inlaws house, yay offsite backups!

At one of my client sites, I built a Raid 5 array file server (hacking XP to accomplish that) with 4-200 gig HD’s that all the computers (Mac and PC) backup daily to. I’m going to do the same at my house as soon as my new computer gets here, with the Raid 5 array backing up to the external only for the digital pictures.

Has anyone else implemented a Raid 5 array? I’d be interested in hearing what your experience has been.

By: Donovan Phillips

Donovan Phillips — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 01:51:32 +0000

Every external drive I’ve ever used has crashed and burned, including the highly vaunted LaCie. For this reason I’m a big fan of backing up all photos to DVD. It’s a pain, but well worth it. I try to back up two different DVDs so I have a redundant backup.

By: Mandyc

Mandyc — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 23:00:22 +0000

I just finally started storing all my work to a hard drive. I purchased a 300GB Seagate External. Seems to be working like a charm. Had a scary run in when I thought I lost a whole wedding that I had not yet edited but already deleted off my CF. But learned some new tricks from some of your comments. (slacker Backup was my favorite!)
Oh and free shoes for the little ones rocks doens’t it.

By: Coelecanth

Coelecanth — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 18:59:27 +0000

The trick is to never do anything so important that losing it would cause problems. Yup, the Slacker BackupÆ works like a charm.

By: julie

julie — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 17:08:02 +0000

i don’t have a back up scheme.. i probably should, but I do want to say that i L_O_V_E my kensington trackball. i don’t know how i ever lived without it. If i coudl marry it, i would, and then we would have little blue mouses with GINORMOUS balls running arouudn the place.

glad it all worked out in the end!

By: Deb

Deb — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 16:53:45 +0000

Just out of a tinge of curiosity, though I KNOW this is surely impossible….but…is there any slight chance your harddisc meltdown could have been passed on through the internet or something? Because my harddisc read HARD DISK FAILURE not even 12 hours after I visited your site and read about your drive’s crashing. Not blaming anyone for this problem so please don’t take that idea, just ‘commenting’ on what a freak and extremely unfortunate coincident it is…and how all my files……down the drain…. *sob*

By: Daniele

Daniele — Tue, 30 Aug 2005 08:22:22 +0000

I use use Apple’s “Back up” app and back up selected folders (Pictures + Documents + Web sites I’m working on) to an external 120Gb fire wire drive approx. once a week. In iTunes I use a smart playlist which automatically includes any songs added after a given date; when the data amounts to 650Mb, I burn a CD.