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Gear / Technical Help => Ask The Tapers => Topic started by: manida on October 26, 2012, 11:42:07 AM
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so, in addition to an external harddrive, does anyone back up their files to DVD-R? Seems like the safest alternative to a potential hardrive(s) crash.
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I backup 4 DVDs or every set I record!
1: wav 24 uncut recording
2: flac 24 uncut recording
3: flac24 tracked DVDs
4: flac16 tracked dvdr
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I do all of my recording in 24 wav. What would be the benefit of backing up in those other 3 formats?
I mean, I can always go back and do editing/tracking to the original uncut 24 wav and save it how I want.
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I burn flacs of the original unedited wav, the individual tracks, a text file, any photos and artwork to a DVD-R.
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I do all of my recording in 24 wav. What would be the benefit of backing up in those other 3 formats?
I mean, I can always go back and do editing/tracking to the original uncut 24 wav and save it how I want.
So I NEVER have to go back and reedit shit. Once it's burned onto DVDs it's done FOREVER ;)
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My Live Recording live on TWO IDENTICAL Hard Drives inside my desktop. On EACH drive I have my Masters as well as all of the tracked copies. The drives are cloned each time I add data to the drive. These 2 drives prevent a hard drive crash from killing my recordings. Unless both die at once...which isn't likely.
On the off chance that both drives do die at once (maybe due to a plane crashing into my house for example), I also make a copy of one of those drives to an external drive of the same size that I keep OFF-SITE. As of now I'm keeping it at my brothers house about 15 miles away. Ideally I'd keep it farther away, but I've come to the conclusion that if something so bad happens that both of our houses are destroyed (maybe a comet hits the Front Range) that I am unlikely to be worried about my recordings.
3 copies. 1 off site. Pretty basic backup strategy.
I don't trust DVD's. Too hard to check to see if they are still working. Can't hurt I guess to have them, but certainly don't depend on them. When your OS starts complaining about a hard drive buy a new one ASAP. Going through that right now.
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I also have an internal and an external he'd that has all 11,000 mp3s I have
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Another good option is to back up your tracked recordings in MP3 format to Google Music. 20,000 free tracks. Obviously MP3 isn't going to be the most desirable format, but you can also stream your music wherever you have an internet connection.
Haven't done that with my live recordings but most of my studio collection is up there (at least the stuff I really care about).
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I recently bought a dedicated 2TB drive to back-up my media server. I just use a clone program to clone the server content onto the back-up drive when I add more files to the server. I also make DVD-R's of the FLACS and photos for each show. I do like the idea of uploading to Google Music. I may start doing that soon. It's free?
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I burn the raw 24 bit (FLAC'd) and the edited and tracked 24 and 16 bit versions (also FLAC'd) to DVD, and save the raw file to an external.
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I do hard drives.....(3) copies, two at my house connected to each of my two computers and
a third at my daughters house (we also have all my families archives this way....videos and pictures going back to 1889)
I don't trust DVDR's. I bought Mitsui Gold's starting ten years ago because they claimed to be 100 year archival quality.
Tens years in, some of them don't mount (glad i always made two copies) I still keep them but have transferred the contents to the hard
drives. I don't waste my time with tracked versions, i only archive the raw recordings. Its nothing to take a raw recording and re-do it.
Three times in 5 years i had to switch out one of the drives, these wear out. Beware having only one copy of your files.
Also i upload about 80% of what i record, so there's alway a copy somewhere in circulation, that is probably the best way to
insure it will be around in the future.
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Call me paranoid but I have THREE DIFFERENT copies of all my masters from 2002 forward on SEPARATE HARD DRIVES. One portable is at home, a second is a desktop drive and a third drive is stored off site and updated every two or three shows. I can't trust even the best DVD-R material to not flake out on me after five years.
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The problem with using hard drives for this purpose--apart from their individual failure rate and somewhat limited service life--is that hard disk interfaces change with the times. Does anyone remember ESDI? My first large hard drive in the early 1990s (a full-height 700 MB Maxtor, costing well over $2000 in today's dollars) used that technology. If that drive still existed, I don't think I could find any way to connect it up now, some 20 years later. My UltraStor (company long out of business) ESDI controller fit only a VLB slot--an expansion card standard for i486 computers, which was quickly abandoned when the Pentium processor was released.
I'm still using Windows XP with a PATA (EIDE) drive as my C: drive. I'm currently looking to build a new Core i5-based PC to run Windows 7, but I notice that a growing number of motherboards in that class don't have on-board support for PATA or floppy drives any more. Hmmm.
Some day the present-day SATA interface will be similarly obsolete. At that point, I suppose the thing to do would be copy all your old hard drives onto whatever seems headed for greatness at that point. But I have reasonable confidence in being able to play back a DVD-R ~20 years from now, at least the single-layer kind. I've had mixed results with dual-layer DVD-Rs.
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Good point dastardly, that's why I use HQ Verbatim DVDRs. They are suppose to have a VERY LONG archival life
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I wouldn't trust cd/dvd/bluray media for archival purposes.
I keep the raw files, any project/montage files and the final mastered fileset as 16bit FLACs
I use two hard drives (and am planning to keep a third at my parents' place). As each drive reaches two-to-three years old it gets retired and replaced - it means I've got lots of hard drives stored away but I know that I've always got two copies of everything on drives that are well within their natural life.
Once I get some off-site backup sorted I'll be pretty content with my setup.
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I trust verbatim DVDRs! I've been strictly using verbatim DVDRs/cdrs since like 1998. I haven't had any problems since tho. Stay away from memorex/Sony/etc.....
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I usually keep 2 copies in 2 external 2.5 HDDs (Toshiba HDD preferred), which I find very handy..., and although I plan to go for 3 copies in the future, lately I tend to keep as well the master recording of my most important and beloved shows in the SD/MicroSD card where they were recorded, of course, considering that SD/MircroSD cards are becoming more and more cheaper....
Other option which I would consider is keeping them in HI-MDs... well, whatever instead of DVD-R´s due to my bad experiences...
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so, in addition to an external harddrive, does anyone back up their files to DVD-R? Seems like the safest alternative to a potential hardrive(s) crash.
Don't rely on dvd-r. I have discs from just a few years ago that are unreadable (Bean - some are Verbatim).
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so, in addition to an external harddrive, does anyone back up their files to DVD-R? Seems like the safest alternative to a potential hardrive(s) crash.
Don't rely on dvd-r. I have discs from just a few years ago that are unreadable (Bean - some are Verbatim).
thats why i burn 4 copies w nero express
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it would be unrealistic for me to keep everything on hdds. i would prob need 4tb every year just for 1 copy of all 4 of my folders, not to mention for everything since 97 i recorded
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I've lost way more DVD's over the years than I care to count. These were high quality Verbatim, TY, etc. and none of the "garbage quality" stuff. I know Hard Drive formats change with the times but right now, I've got a 3TB drive "online" which has all my music plus two copies of the files on separate portable hard drives. They're both currently USB 3.0 as well. They do the trick and at least I know my important data isn't going to be lost.
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what program did u burn em with?
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what program did u burn em with?
Nero. And _ALWAYS_ at the slowest speed possible. I've lost actual DVD's with content I've produced over the years as well as data discs. When I started moving the content to hard drives about four years back -- from discs that were stored in a temperature controlled environment in a cake packs (in a box) -- about 25-30% of them had read errors. Some of them were readable on different drives (in some cases, I had to try six or seven different computers at work) but in about 5% of the cases, there were parts that were completely unreadable so the content had to be reacquired or "given up on."
Suffice to say, I'll stick with hard drives going forward (and have for the last four years). I've had a few drives even signal an "early death" via SMART, however, I was able to recover all of the data except for _ONE_ file which I had backed up elsewhere, anyhow. :)
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it would be unrealistic for me to keep everything on hdds. i would prob need 4tb every year just for 1 copy of all 4 of my folders, not to mention for everything since 97 i recorded
You could cut your backups by a little less than half by including only...
2: flac 24 uncut recording -- you may extract your 24-bit uncut WAV from the FLAC
3: flac24 tracked DVDs -- you could derived your 16-bit version simply by dithering
...or better yet more than half by...
FLAC uncut recording + cue sheet + notes on basic post-processing like normalizing and compression
'Course, that doesn't get into what you mean by "tracked" and whether that includes any post-processing. If it's truly just tracking (or just normalizing or even basic compression across the entire file) -- without any heavy post-processing -- you could simply store the original 24-bit FLAC or WAV + a cue sheet + brief notes on the normalizing / compression you applied. This is what I do for most of my recordings...unless I do heavy post-processing, in which case I'll keep the original + cue sheet / notes + a 24- or 16-bit rendered copy.
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Had to check the date on this thread to make sure it wasn't from 10 years ago.
why would you make 'archival' backups to a media that degrades over time? That is the antithesis of archiving.
redundant backups at home and another I keep in my safe deposit box.
hd's are cheap, and just slightly more convenient than burning dvd's.
You guys still use zip discs as well?
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My maths might be a bit off but here in the UK a spindle of 100 Verbatim DVDs cost £20 - so that's just less than 500GB for £20.
A 2TB external drive costs less than £70 - so it's quicker, cheaper, smaller and arguably more reliable.
I can see the attraction in having something physical live a DVD as a back-up and can understand not wanting to put all one's eggs in one basket as it were but still...
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adrianf, most CD and DVD recorders produce discs with the lowest rate of subsequent read errors when they're operated toward the faster end of their available speed range, not the slower end.
I'm hedging that statement only because I'm sure I haven't read every test that's ever been made. But in the several professionally conducted comparative tests that I have read since higher-speed drives first became available (I was in the business when CD-Rs were introduced, recorders ran strictly at 1x speed and cost ~$5,000 in 1980s dollars, and blank discs cost $75 apiece), that has always been the result. And I have to admit that I don't know exactly why it's true; I could guess, but I'm not gonna.
--So far in this discussion, I feel that the people who back their recordings up on multiple hard drives have many good points in their favor, provided that they don't run those drives continually, and provided that they copy the contents over to new hard drives in a cycle such as "every four years" or something like that. I'm not personally going to go there, but their points are good, and many professionals would agree with their choice of strategy.
I really can't agree with the idea of using FLAC, though. That just increases the density of the stored material--if/when a sector goes bad, you'll lose that much more of your material. Hard drives today do a lot of internal error correction because their areal density has been pushed so very, very high for (basically) economic reasons. But you can't see that error correction occurring since it's all internal to the drive's electronics. Then suddenly you get an avalanche.
--best regards
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Dsatz, I burn all of my DVDRs at 16x. Regardless, I'll still continue to use verbatim DVDRs. Having 10. 2 tb exhdda isnt realistic for me. Burning multiple DVDRs is. Period ;)!
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This is my current back up situation:
For audio:
raw 24/48 unaltered masters
edited flac tracks 24/48 + info
Both on two different external HDD at the same location.
I'm looking for a third HDD to place at a different location.
I do full HD video too:
raw sd card master copied to HDD
edited MKV in best possible quality.
I also keep the software cue sheets so editing is always possible in the future.
Again, both on two different HDD.
Sometimes, when I shoot video and do audio a concert archived this way takes up 50 GB.
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Well, I don't have that many recordings I made (just one...) but I've been a concert photographer for 8 years now and RAW files from a DSLR (not the JPG) are comparable huge to JPGs. I have an external drive with all my photos on and every now and then copy the raw files to DVD RAM, not DVDR. Still, I never lost any of my burned Verbatim DVDR, which I mostly burn at mid speed or highest speed, not slowest. It's slow enough to copy files to DVD RAM which are only available in 3/5x and the 3x are WAY cheaper. You can do the math how long it would take to backup more than 300GB photos burning at slowest speed. There's only one set of photos I do have three copies of: 1 on an internal drive, and one on each of my portable drives (of which one is just a small pocket drive to take on the road).
I don't have the money to buy more backup drives right now. Additionally, all drive slots in my desktop are used and all the drives are almost full (total of 6.5TB) but I have to say, in way more than 10 years, none of my drives ever died. And actually all I know of that still exist, they are still working. I'm honest - I'm lazy and maybe should spend more time, care and money onto backup solutions. But tho all of this is great memory (photos, recordings and such) - in the end it's all just 0s and 1s, bits and bytes. It's not the actual memory and to erase THIS it takes way more than a power fail or a dying pack of technology ;)
I'm actually feeling quite uncomfortable with external drives to be honest. Cuz the life time of a harddrive is never how long they run but how often they get started and stopped. My desktop pc's ever since have been running 24/7 when I'm at home (so they in the end get starts and stops maybe 10 times a year). So none of my harddrives ever will reach the 10,000 starts and stops they are averagely designed for. An external drive always gets started and stopped way more often. So that actually might die a lot sooner.
Actually backups are quite complicated if you can't buy as many drives as you want. I'd love to have one or two NAS storages, but tho I know they do have great prices for what they offer, it's just out of question for my budget. So I currently stick with getting DVD RAM when they are on sale.
Call me naive but I would actually never do all the effort in doing 3 or 4 copies and store them somewhere else or even in a safe box somewhere. I don't think that me and my tiny little stuff I do might be of any interest for upcoming generations so that I would need to store them that good. Maybe even I don't care for these things in like 30 years....
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You sound a bit naive...
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Well, I don't have that many recordings I made (just one...) but I've been a concert photographer for 8 years now and RAW files from a DSLR (not the JPG) are comparable huge to JPGs. I have an external drive with all my photos on and every now and then copy the raw files to DVD RAM, not DVDR. Still, I never lost any of my burned Verbatim DVDR, which I mostly burn at mid speed or highest speed, not slowest. It's slow enough to copy files to DVD RAM which are only available in 3/5x and the 3x are WAY cheaper. You can do the math how long it would take to backup more than 300GB photos burning at slowest speed. There's only one set of photos I do have three copies of: 1 on an internal drive, and one on each of my portable drives (of which one is just a small pocket drive to take on the road).
I don't have the money to buy more backup drives right now. Additionally, all drive slots in my desktop are used and all the drives are almost full (total of 6.5TB) but I have to say, in way more than 10 years, none of my drives ever died. And actually all I know of that still exist, they are still working. I'm honest - I'm lazy and maybe should spend more time, care and money onto backup solutions. But tho all of this is great memory (photos, recordings and such) - in the end it's all just 0s and 1s, bits and bytes. It's not the actual memory and to erase THIS it takes way more than a power fail or a dying pack of technology ;)
I'm actually feeling quite uncomfortable with external drives to be honest. Cuz the life time of a harddrive is never how long they run but how often they get started and stopped. My desktop pc's ever since have been running 24/7 when I'm at home (so they in the end get starts and stops maybe 10 times a year). So none of my harddrives ever will reach the 10,000 starts and stops they are averagely designed for. An external drive always gets started and stopped way more often. So that actually might die a lot sooner.
Actually backups are quite complicated if you can't buy as many drives as you want. I'd love to have one or two NAS storages, but tho I know they do have great prices for what they offer, it's just out of question for my budget. So I currently stick with getting DVD RAM when they are on sale.
Call me naive but I would actually never do all the effort in doing 3 or 4 copies and store them somewhere else or even in a safe box somewhere. I don't think that me and my tiny little stuff I do might be of any interest for upcoming generations so that I would need to store them that good. Maybe even I don't care for these things in like 30 years....
This will be my last post in this thread as I think my previous response came across somewhat pointed, as will this one.
To have only one copy of your files, on a hard drive that has been running for 10 years, with no plans to back them up at least redundantly much less at a remote locations shows that you have never had a previous data failure.
While your files might not be worth brazilians of dollars, just imagine what you would do if you get home tonight and there had been a power surge and all of your hard drives are fried? or what if there was a leak and your computer had water damage?
I have never had failures like that but I have had a hard drive fail on me, not electronically, physically. the discs were destroyed and there was no chance of data recovery. Since then I have preached redundant backups to as many people as possible and have had very few who still think it isn't necessary. What about all the pictures of your partner, kids, dogs, parents, etc that are only in digital form? Taxes, business accountings, etc?
I could go on and on but it seems like you have your mind made up so I will wish you good luck.
I still stand by my statement that backing up files to a physical media that degrades is a poor choice, better than nothing but far from what should be considered and archive.
also, as far as how much data I use. On average I use about 10 gigs per show when I'm doing a 4 ch matrix. I record around 100 shows per year = 1 tb or 2 tb for redundancy. I usually pick up 4 tb of drives at a time when they are on sale. If sleeping easy at night for the cost of 150-200 bucks isn't worth it to you than I'm not sure what I can say to convince you.
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what a great post! Thanks!
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I sleep perfectly well at night not worrying about my archival method. It is just a hobby afterall.
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I'm surprised no one has mentioned Carbonite or some other online data backup site. Is it cost-prohibitive to upload gigs and gigs of shows?
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I'm surprised no one has mentioned Carbonite or some other online data backup site. Is it cost-prohibitive to upload gigs and gigs of shows?
im @ ~5tb of recordings here, and i cant even imagine the time needed to complete uploading all of that to an offsite company/server.
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I sleep perfectly well at night not worrying about my archival method. It is just a hobby afterall.
Right now I have no backup. Everything is on a 1.5TB HDD. Must get the PC repaired so I can backup to the 2TB sitting there inactive. I love living dangerously.
MSTaper
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The services that provide data backup are services. They're probably reliable while they exist, but I would never trust them solely. If the company goes bankrupt, your data might be here today and gone tomorrow. I also enjoy using LMA to backup my sources, but again who knows if they'll be around forever.
Backing up 3 or 4 or 10 times onto DVDRs doesn't provide 100% assurance they'll last and doesn't assure data retention, it just makes your chances a little better that one of the discs will still be readable when they do start to fail. Experience is that all media will eventually break down over time and become less and less capable of being read, so expecting someting that you make today to still be around years from now is just not IMHO a strategy that provides the best insurance against data loss over time...eventually all 10 DVDRs will fail. Even analog media fails...Zappa's archive tapes are having to be restored professionally before they can be spun. Digital media is much more prone to becoming non-functional due to data read errors, where only minor media degradation of some sectors can cause an entire disc to become unreadable.
The key IMHO is to anticipate that media fails...so you need to always be proactive about failures. You do this by ensuring that the your strategy is data focused, not media focused. To guard against data loss, the best methodolgies imitate how company's protect their intellectual property that's stored on electronic media...engineering documents, legal documents, etc. That involves frequent data backups, data redundancy, offsite storage, and keeping current with technology.
I don't necessarily consider my music data to be so essential that I need to keep it on the latest greatest technology, but I do make sure my method includes frequent backups, redundancy, and offsite storage. I have 6 hard drives and follow exactly the same strategy that Ed Tyre mentioned a page or two back. If a hard drive shows the first sign of a problem, I back it up and plan on retiring that drive soon. I've retired I think 4 or 5 drives over the last 5 years or so...about one a year. I consider one drive a year to be the cost of ensuring I'll never lose my music.
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If a hard drive shows the first sign of a problem, I back it up and plan on retiring that drive soon. I've retired I think 4 or 5 drives over the last 5 years or so...about one a year. I consider one drive a year to be the cost of ensuring I'll never lose my music.
What are the warning signs of a dying external HDD? Are there diagnostic tests that can be run on one? I used to use the old chkdsk utility back in the DOS days. Is there a similar animal now? What about things like disk defrag or disk cleanup?
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If a hard drive shows the first sign of a problem, I back it up and plan on retiring that drive soon. I've retired I think 4 or 5 drives over the last 5 years or so...about one a year. I consider one drive a year to be the cost of ensuring I'll never lose my music.
What are the warning signs of a dying external HDD? Are there diagnostic tests that can be run on one? I used to use the old chkdsk utility back in the DOS days. Is there a similar animal now? What about things like disk defrag or disk cleanup?
To be honest, I'm not sure if there's any software that helps diagnose a drive failure. I think the programs you mention help to diagnose bad sectors on a HDD and move data away from those sectors. The issues I'm more concerned about involve the mechanical failures of the hard drive that made a complete drive un-readable. These are catastrophic failures and can't be recovered from without sending your drive to an expert and having them somehow perform a miracle to get your info back (at a high expense).
Keep in mind though that not all drives give you warning signs before they fail. A drive motor can stop without warning. But the most typical warning sign I know of is a drive that starts to make a clicking noise. I've had that happen to me on two impending drive failures. The first time I didn't know what the issue was...even though I should have realized that it was time to back up my drive and that it was about ready to fail. The drive continued to operate for quite a while with the noise, but eventually failed.
A second warning sign is that the drive would not mount consistently every time I connected it. This actually was a second symptom of the above drive while it was clicking.
I third warning sign is probably related to the first, but it's to feel your drive and feel if the drive has any odd feel...if the drive feels like it isn't spinning smoothely or if they're some odd bumping or grinding feeling to it. Sometimes, you gotta know what your drive feels like normally though in order to be able to 'go by feel'.
I'd say none of these are definitive methods, but they can all be helpful in anticipating if your drive is on it's way out.
After learning my lesson the hard way (I lost a bunch of digital pictures that I didn't realize I hadn't backed up) for the first drive failure, I've tried to be as proactive as possible with drive management. So, when I hear any extra clicking, for example, that's when I realize it's time to run out and buy a replacement drive, if the data on the clicking drive isn't backed up.
If the data IS backed up, I might wait until that drive fails, rather than just retiring the drive. It probably just depends on the info I have (weither to wait or buy a new one at first warning sign). However, if the drive does finally fail for good, I'll make sure and buy a replacmenet right away because once I have a failure, that means that I have data that's no longer redundant. Obviously, once I get a replacement, the first thing I do is re-back-up the data from the existing good drive to restore redundancy.
I'm not a huge fan of buying the most expensive drives out there. Personally, I've bought expensive drives and cheap drives. They all fail and I don't see any evidence that the expensive drives last any longer than the cheap drives. Of the 6 drives I've got downstairs, a couple were el cheapo and they're still spinning five years later. So I tend to just go with whatever is available for a reasonable price and just stay on top of it. Fortunately, I've never had a drive fail soon after purchase, but even if I did I would still use the same strategy as above. Like I said, one new drive a year is about what I plan for as an average.
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Keeping with the theory of varying media for the best backup reliability, how about recording the shows off to cassette ;)
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i have everything on my Drobo. if that fails for some reason, i figure that i've shared them enough to the point where they'll be easily reobtained. that's motivation enough to actually convert and seed. also, i try to get every band possible on the LMA that i can... just extra insurance that my tapes will stay preserved.
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i've got three copies of everything and i still don't feel safe. actually i do feel pretty safe, but i've had hard drives fail and it sucks!
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There is a similar thread in Taper Chat:
http://taperssection.com/index.php?topic=158870.0
I recommended CrashPlan as a cloud backup service. It was pointed out that as a consumer level service, there is no guarantee that it will be around in a few years (whether it goes belly up, or gets bought out). I've since found out that they do offer business and enterprise scale backup services, so perhaps this gives me a bit more confidence that they'll be around for the foreseeable future.
Anyway, I am running 3 copies of my precious data (personal pix, videos and recordings). I have a live hard drive, a backup and on Crashplan. For now, this seems to work and it is cost effective. If I change my mind, I will probably set up a RAID.