What would you do with your files if you are on my situation

[nonamexx]

Anybody advising you to back up on an external USB hard drive (the consumer-grade variety) is inexperienced with these devices. THEY ARE NOT MEANT FOR LONG-TERM BACKUPS!! Don't use external hard drives for archival purposes!

The best industrial solution for backup is still tape drives. And they still use it in companies. Wonder why?

At the consumer level, I still suggest using a huge stack of CDs to backup. They are dead cheap and CDs are more reliable than DVDs because they don't store so much bits in the same surface area. Get a couple of stacks of good archival quality CDs and use them for backup.

I am afraid it is an effort and it takes a while to burn so many Gigs into CDs. But it's way better than putting all your eggs into one basket.

Don't put all your files in a consumer-grade external hard disk which is self-powered. They ARE prone to failure.

 

[Dao]

Anybody advising you to back up on an external USB hard drive (the consumer-grade variety) is inexperienced with these devices. THEY ARE NOT MEANT FOR LONG-TERM BACKUPS!! Don't use external hard drives for archival purposes!

The best industrial solution for backup is still tape drives. And they still use it in companies. Wonder why?

At the consumer level, I still suggest using a huge stack of CDs to backup. They are dead cheap and CDs are more reliable than DVDs because they don't store so much bits in the same surface area. Get a couple of stacks of good archival quality CDs and use them for backup.

I am afraid it is an effort and it takes a while to burn so many Gigs into CDs. But it's way better than putting all your eggs into one basket.

Don't put all your files in a consumer-grade external hard disk which is self-powered. They ARE prone to failure.

Many companies are moving from tape to disk storage for backup. And company replace tapes all the time and throw / destroy the old tapes since they wear out. An EMC reps that I talked to few years ago said they sell some lower performance storage system to banks for them to archive check/cheque image. (system based on SATA drives)

As for hard disk use it as backup. Again, we are talking about backup, not just storage. It should be fine. If my images are store on more than one devices and one of them is not power on all the time (backup). I do not see why not.

Also, I do not recommend people use one medium to store your files for 50 years. I suggest use it for 10 to 20 years the most. And then transfer them to whatever the medium at that time because a technology may die and you still have the data, it is safe. But you do not have a device to read it back. If you have a Hard disk using MFM/RLL/ESDI controller, good luck finding a controller card or computer that has ISA/EISA slot.

CDs are more reliable, but time involve to burn a CD and it can only store 60 RAW images produced by my 40D (only 10mpix). I will rather use something else.

 

[dylanstraub]

I bought this network attached storage unit from Newegg recently. It's not quite as over the top as Buckster's rig:mrgreen: but it's good for starting out and you can build on it. It comes with a lot of nice extra's like an Iphone app (monitoring and remote) as well as an ftp server and access via Http,Itunes server and Twonkymedia server to name a few. I also picked out two {2tb} hard drives to get started. They were 99$ a piece but I got a 20$ rebate on both.