A TB of storage

[Curt]

Now that I'm making large scan files and have used a portion of my external disk drive that I also use to backup my computer I've decided to get another external drive for image files. I am looking at 1 and or 1.5 Terabyte drives.

What storage system are you using?

Curt

[pellicle]

I use my negatives as my primary storage.

My scanner is my optical drive to read this.

I have found that since I started scanning (in 1996 or so) that my technique and available equipment has advanced so that its better to go back to the negs and scan again if I want to print.

what will you do when your drive dies? Will you have redundant backups?

nope, negs will be around in 60 years, drives wont (Ohh, and I'm a database analyst and work for a national library in a mass digitization [news paper archiving] project in my present day job)

here is a lovely instance of the reasons why I currently stand by my above recommendation

http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/

This was created in dedication to the photographer Vivian Maier, a street photographer from the 1950s - 1990s. Vivian's work was discovered at an auction here in Chicago where she resided most of her life. Her discovered work includes about 100,000 mostly medium format negatives and a ton of undeveloped rolls of film. Born February 1, 1926 and deceased on Tuesday, April 21, 2009.

reckon anyone would be fishing her HD's out of the garbage?

PS: I have 2 USB TB drives and 3 PC's (two XP one Redhat) with various sizes of internal drive. I presently cross back up to 2 of them and the TB storage ... I have another one "off site" on my desk at work. Disaster recovery.

[TSSPro]

Its not a matter of if your external drives will fail, but when. They will not last forever and technology will march on without them. I tend to go for drives that have an external power source and an on-off switch so that your drive wont spin even if its not being used.

I have been using iomega drives lately. They are fairly inexpensive and have the on-off switch which can help in limiting their overall wear.

Best of luck with your choice.

[pellicle]

Hi ... just to add to the content for the OP to consider

Its not a matter of if your external drives will fail, but when.

this is 100% correct. Further you need to think in statistical evaluation, mean time before failure could mean it dies in ten days or dies in 10 years

you just never know

sometimes bearings make horrible noises for months before it goes, other times internal controllers die and its kaput.

I have been using iomega drives lately. They are fairly inexpensive and have the on-off switch which can help in limiting their overall wear.

I believe that we get best life from the drives which are running permanently and never switched off. Certainly high rates of on off will lead to an early death. I've got a nice buffalo brand drive here which powers down automatically as the machine shuts down or you dismount it.

a nice touch ... but it does not seem to like being inactive and goes into some sort of strange noisy holding pattern when its inactive. I'm concerned that this indicates that when the head is "parked" its rubbing on something.

another issue in backup is that you actually verify the data ... copy does not verify itself (though some utilities do) thus (for us) an issue is having a file format which is fault tolerant. If you corrupt a bit in a TIFF you mostly will only loose a pixel, but if you do that with a JPG you'll loose more.

[Marco B]

Its not a matter of if your external drives will fail, but when. They will not last forever and technology will march on without them. I tend to go for drives that have an external power source and an on-off switch so that your drive wont spin even if its not being used.

I think the risk of modern drives failing is over-rated. I have a 6-7 years old Maxtor 200GB 7200RPM disk from a former computer in my also not so young replacement computer, that is still going strong after many start-ups. Running chkdsk with the /R option has shown me not even a single bad sector. I do make proper backups of course to an external hard drive via USB2. Total Commander has a great synchronizing option for that.

Most people will have replaced their computer and copied their data way before the hard-disk fails.

I think most cases where people assume a true hard-disk failure like a crash, are nowadays attributable to some form of small soft- or hardware glitch and the messing up of the file system as a consequence of that. Running chkdsk will in most cases solve this.

The worst thing in 15 years I ever had to deal with was when my nephew (the sun of my sister), tried downloading something and it failed.

Couldn't even start-up in safe-mode!

I than created a bootable BartPE CD with a limited XP SP3 installation on it, and was able to restore the PC by running chkdsk multiple times against the messed up drive. PE builder is really great for these kind of things.

That computer has been running safely for at least six months now since that issue...

And if all had failed, and I hadn't been able to bring back to life the operating system, the BartPE CD would have allowed me to copy data from the offended disk if not truely crashed. Re-installation of the operating system would than be safe.

[bob carnie]

Curt

Currently we use TBite drives to store images,
I am now considering a larger type unit Raid which can handle more info.

We store and scan large files of Colour Negative images because, these negatives do fall apart in dark storage and we want to make sure we have a record of critical images shot on colour negative.
We have seen colour negatives that are 15 years old , that have serious problems, and this is from more than one photographers work.


Pellicle makes a good point about storage, but I have to disagree when it comes to Colour C41 type negatives.
Black and White, Transparancies seem to have a longer shelf life and we are not as worried, about image shelf life , therefore are more confident to store images in negative or transparancey form in sleeves in boxes.


We do make scans *low rez of all film worthy of a first glance and over the years these scans do take up a lot of space and planning for the future is important.

As we scan, rather than network the files to another hard drive we burn dvd's and load to the drive from the dvd. This way we have original scan on the Scanner TB hard drive, the scans on DVD which we save, and then on new Hard Drive for storage on another computer.
This is as far as we have gotten with our strategy and basically waiting for the technology geeks to come up with a way to move with ease our images from these TB drives.

[R Shaffer]

I have had my external drive fail. It was a WD My Book, 500gb and it was my primary storage for my photos. Fortunately, I had my most valuable stuff, family images from vacations, holidays, ect on CD's as well. But I lost a lot that I really wish I still had.

So when I upgraded the computer, which I use for 100% of my work as well as my photos, I installed a 3- 750gig raid 5 array and have a spare matching drive in the closet, for hot swap if one dies. I can loose one drive and still have an operable system, if two die, then I am relying on my back-up. My back-up is a 1Tb Seagate External that ports into my router.

So I would 100% agree that you really need to PLAN your storage based on "when the drive fails" not "if the drive will fail".

[Marco B]

So I would 100% agree that you really need to PLAN your storage based on "when the drive fails" not "if the drive will fail".

I totally agree, that is why I make backups to an external harddrive from my main drive on my PC. Still thinking of getting a second backup drive, to store outside my house, in case it burns down once

I was just saying, hard drives nowadays are quite reliable, compared to 10-15 years ago.

And I still think that many people who write-off their hard-drive as broken because "the system won't boot" or "start-up", are actually having resolvable file system issues.

They just don't have the knowledge to solve these. Buying a new laptop is the easy way out than...

Marco

[pellicle]

Bob

but I have to disagree when it comes to Colour C41 type negatives. Black and White, Transparancies seem to have a longer shelf life and we are not as worried, about image shelf life , therefore are more confident to store images in negative or transparancey form in sleeves in boxes.

thanks for providing that ... I am so far into digital that I almost only use black and white negative anymore. I completely was not thinking of colour, so when you said that I had a "douh" moment.

I have some E-4 stuff at home which is nearly clear now.

To the Curt:
Chemistry quality is of course critical and bucketloads of labs are skimping on that badly, so scanning colour neg and E-6 slides may provide an excellent option for archiving.

But don't underplay the storage failure, its like all those people who say "I've never had a car accident". You may never have one (good), but don't bank on that.

I personally buy a new drive every year or two and migrate all that is on the smaller one onto the bigger one. Since 2001 I've not lost any data even though some of the drives (re tasked to other purposes) have failed.

:-)

PS ... definitely do not rely on DVD-R or CD-R as backup

[pellicle]

Bob

This is as far as we have gotten with our strategy and basically waiting for the technology geeks to come up with a way to move with ease our images from these TB drives.

gigabit ethernet to a SAN or NAS?

As we scan, rather than network the files to another hard drive we burn dvd's and load to the drive from the dvd. This way we have original scan on the Scanner TB hard drive, the scans on DVD which we save, and then on new Hard Drive for storage on another computer.

which is (while expensive) an interesting strategy ... we recenly had a D#LL server go down and with the rescue disk inserted something dreadful happend ... software saw a number of disks attached and said "hey, I'll just write onto that fiber channel"

50 or so TB later .... took down two weeks of the scanning teams work.

you can bet that didn't go quietly in the organisation either...