This is part of an email exchange that my friend Mark and I had about backing up your data:
Mark started it off with:
> But that’s not why I’m writing. I’m writing to ask your learned opinion
> about backing up my data. Up until recently I have been burning periodic
> CD’s of the important stuff on our home computer. And up until recently
> it has all fit nicely on a single CD. But since Xmas since I got that
> iPod and especially in the last month since I got that digital camera, I
> have way more data than will fit on a CD. What to do now?
A continuous question. 🙂
I’m starting to run into the same issue. I just bought a new digital slr
(the canon 300D if you are curious) and am going to starting having gigs of
photos to keep track of and backup.
I’m actually writing a DB/Web program to manage my images right now.
One of the things I’m going to add into the program is that it will track
which DVD you made a backup of the image onto.
> – Continue to use CD’s but set up a more sophisticates system that backs
> up only the changes and compresses?
That’s an option, but a pain.
> – Get an external DVD burner?
A pretty good option, but you will eventually run into the same issue as
you have with CDs. Plus (and this is an issue I bet you have already run
into with CDs) how do you track what is on each disc? With a DVD you now
have about 7 times as much data to catalog per disc.
> – Get an external Fire Wire or USB hard drive?
I like this method the most. It’s portable. The main drawback is that it is
a hard drive and hard drives do fail eventually. But it is (relatively)
cheap, and it’s fast. The other issue is that sooner or later you will
start using it for primary storage and then you won’t have a backup of your
data any more. It’s much easier to just leave it plugged in and put the
files right on it…
> I’m kind of leaning toward that hard drive. It seems I can get 100Gb+ for
> about a dollar or two per Gb. If you have any advice in this matter, I’d
> love to hear it.
I don’t have a really good solution (nobody really does.) There are many,
many issues with data storage, especially long-term data storage. The main
issue that I have with digital vs. film photography is long term storage.
Film lasts a long, long time. Digital media? Who knows how long a DVD will
last? Especially one that is burned and not stamped. And will you still
have hardware to read it in 20 years?
This is a well known issue. NASA and JPL both have more data then they can
handle and some is lost due to file format and media changes. And they
can’t copy it to new media fast enough to keep ahead of it.
At this point, I would lean towards getting an external hard drive AND a
DVD burner. Backup all your data to the hard drive and burn DVDs of the
really important stuff (digital photos, tax records, etc…) That way, when
the external hard drive fails (and it will fail, they all do) you don’t
lose the really important stuff.
My strategy is going to be close to that. I think I’m going to build a
network storage server with RAID for redundancy and I have a 20GB DLT tape
drive for general backups. I’m also planning on burning my digital photos
to DVD at a regular interval, just in case.
