What To Use To Archive / Back Up / Store Images Long Term ?

[bmattock]

well, the one nice thing about the drobo (which I wouldn't recommend either), is that it essentially does the raid 5 array for you, with hot swap, as far as I can tell. It then has to attach via a bus but mine does, too, intenerally, via a raid card. I can see where it has its place. It's nice, at the least, to see an external, raid-based array that lets you pull drives out. The LaCie drives that were just RAID 0 arrays where you couldn't get to the drives always worried me.

I don't even like RAID. JBoD works for me. Duplication to cut down on failure errors. JBoD means each drive can be read individually in other systems. RAID, when striped, means they all work together in the same system or they don't work at all. Redundancy inside the same system smacks of taunting entropy to me. You just move the SPoF from the drives to the RAID hardware/software.

 

[kaiyen]

JBOD - interesting. I guess if I had enough disk arrays I wouldn't mind that, but if a single disk in a JBOD failed and I lost everything on that one, I would really be needing that 2nd JBOD location. Whereas I have had a RAID 5 array lose a disc and I replaced it the next day without incident.

 

[bmattock]

JBOD - interesting. I guess if I had enough disk arrays I wouldn't mind that, but if a single disk in a JBOD failed and I lost everything on that one, I would really be needing that 2nd JBOD location. Whereas I have had a RAID 5 array lose a disc and I replaced it the next day without incident.

Well, in my case, the way things worked out favored JBoD. I have, let's see...12 old formerly-internal IDE and SATA drives, ranging from 80 gig to 500 gig in size each. I don't have a RAID array, but I have a mess o' external USB-IDE/SATA adapters, that cost $15 each at MicroCenter. So it just makes sense.

Besides, as you pointed out, you lose a drive, you replace it and it resyncs. You lose the RAID box and you are hosed for retrieving any data at all until you replace the RAID hardware/software. I lose a drive, I have three more with redundant data just like it, and they're readable anywhere I can plug in a USB cable (Linux partitions, that is).

 

[ampguy]

Hi Dave,

I personally like keeping everything ultimately in analog format (printed, or negatives), but short of that, at least 3 digital copies, including one or more off-site versions of all of our audio/visual media.

 

[peterm1]

I have a lot of images that do not make the cut. The best image I put in a "favorites" folder - soon to be further subdivided and categorised and the others just stay on an external high capacity HDD. The favourites are copied to a portable HDD which usually resides in my office at work. I figure that's enough redundancy and whilst I may lose some files if the worst happened I will have the ones I really want to keep, failing a monumental disaster.