Best Way to Back Up Photos and Video? 642
jsalbre writes "I do a lot of digital video work, and my wife is a professional photographer. With raw DV from the video camera using up 11GB/hr, and raw images from the digital SLR using 7MB I'm quickly using up a lot of space. I currently back up all my important files each night from one harddrive to another, but I now have over 200GB of irreplaceable data (more than just DV and photos, but those make up the largest chunk) and I'm having to exclude the "less important" irreplaceable files as my backups have started failing. Several people have suggested backing up vital unchanging files to DVD (video, images,) and continue backing up frequently accessed files to harddrive, but with recent studies showing that optical media doesn't last very long I don't want to come back in a few years and find that all my backups are useless. Not to mention that some of my DV files are larger than even a dual-layer DVD, and it would be near impossible to automate backup to DVD. How do other Slashdotters back up their important data? I'd appreciate distinction between methods for frequently accessed files and for infrequently accessed files. Any suggestions will be highly appreciated!"
Re: Backups (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not make two optical backups. Store at least one in a fireproof safe. For the massive files, you might have to invest in one or two hot swappable drives you can use as 'tapes', storing one in your safe. Mirroring might help.
Re: Backups (Score:5, Interesting)
First that comes to mind is Tape backup. They store huge about of data, and are very cheap these days, and have been proven to last for a while. Keep a good backup schedule, and keep one copy of the tapes offsite.
Secondly, I'd do optical. Optical's cheaper, but it's also not as long lasting, and takes longer to make the actual back up.
Thirdly, I'd do RAID. Mirror all the files onto a second set of hard drives. If you really want to get paranoid, mirror onto two sets of drives, and once a week swap out a copy of mirrored drives from a fireproof location.
If your data is truely irreplacable, then this is a good regiment. But it's also very expensive.. so you'll have to make up your mind.
Re: Backups (Score:4, Insightful)
So what you'd suggest is that he downloads the video from the MiniDV tape to the computer, then archives it onto backup tapes. Why not just keep the original MiniDV?
Re: Backups (Score:5, Insightful)
First, the new data may have been processed (edits, color correction, etc).
Second, the backup media may be better rated for long term storage. I'm not familiar with MiniDV, the stuff I work with is all DLT and HCART2 under Veritas Netbackup, at 200GB raw/400GB compressed per tape.
Third, it may be helpful to have the indexing done for him by a good backup program.
However, as I say, I work with Netbackup. To say it's pricey is an understatement... but it's changed my views on what's a "workable" backup system to only liking enterprise grade stuff.
Re: Backups (Score:3, Interesting)
Probably because mini-DV holds about 13GB and an LTO has a capacity of 400GB. Get a 4 tape autochanger and you've got 1.2TB, or about 92 Mini-DV tapes.
Re: Backups (Score:3, Insightful)
But most of the time, it's a digital camera, where it's flash ram it's recording to. For digital video, it's most likely in need of some editing which is the whole reason to bring it into the computer anyways, which is when you need to start the backup proceedure.
Re: Backups (Score:5, Informative)
In everything I've read, the moral definitely seems to be harddrives, lots of harddrives, for price performance. I'm assuming you have a reasonable LAN or can set one up.
Here's the setup I haven't finished implementing yet: PLEASE give me any comments about it to help me improve my setup.
1. Setup a file server using at least one big, inexpensive disk. (This can also be a desktop as long as it can reasonably serve files.) This is your "USE" server.
2. Separate you files (on a per-directory basis) into categories based on how frequently they are changed. The important consideration is: 'If a file is changed/deleted from USE how long should I wait delete a file in the backup' Personally, I only need two categories. "current" = a month or so depending on disk space and "archive" = never (family pics, videos, etc.)
That means that if I delete something in my "current" tree _AND_ I don't notice for a month, my backups will delete it and it's gone forever.
3. Setup a 'backup server' using at least one inexpensive hard disk. Set your backup server to login to your USE server and sync your files.
It should be able to do both "full" (copy everything) and "incremental versioning" = "IV" (if something is changed, keep BOTH copies, marking them appropriately) backups. Neither of these kinds of backups should ever eliminate any information automatically - they should just add information.
4) For me, I'd run:
1) An IV backup of "archive" every night.
2) A full backup of "current" every week.
3) An IV backup of "current" every night.
4) A job that deleted the oldest backups of current every week.
Notice that I'm _never_ running a full backup of "archive" but I'm also _never_ deleting the backup.
Notes:
rsync or rsync over ssh is my preference for doing this kind of backup. It works very nicely, but I'm too tired to get it right just this minute so I'm leaving IV/full backup commands as exercises for other
cron is fine for setting it up automatically.
wget has similar functionality to rsync for a website and you don't need any privileges.
I think most of
Do make sure you log the output of your syncing software. Also make sure you monitor disk usage. If you want to be fancy, it could keep all of the full-backups of "current" until space is short (with a reasonable margin) and then always delete as many of the oldest ones as it needs to to make enough room. This means your number of snapshots will vary with disk space - some people think that's evil.
This system scales reasonably well - for more size add more harddrives per server and/or more servers. For redundancy add more backups per live copy. As long as you can keep it organized and your network handles it, there's also no reason a USE server can't be served by two backup servers or a backup server can't also serve several smaller workstations - or any combination thereof.
Do not add multiple harddrives to a backup server for redundancy. These servers are essentially free and you get much more redundancy (and some scalability) if you use two backup servers. With a setup like this, any server should only have one copy (excepting multiple versions of the same tree)
You could just do a full backup of current every night or whatever, and you could have many possibly more complicated "current" backup schemes. But for me the total size of "current" is massively smaller than "archive" so it's really not important. Remember, having more of these isn't more redundant - they're all on the same drive.
This backup server should generally run no services except possibly ssh and certainly shouldn'
Re: Backups (Score:4, Informative)
First of all, disks are *so cheap* these days, hard drives are a more than acceptable backup medium. As disks tend to be identical in size and construction if you buy in batches, disk-to-disk backup is quite the good system, just as long as you don't always keep the disks in the same location (aka, not even on the same controller! *gasp*)
Secondly, you went into a lot of specifics that I didn't care to; a lot of backup systems are custom tailored to the situation.. so while this kind of system might work great for you, I doubt if it would work so well in this case, especially. Digital media tends to be very non-compressible, very volatile media. That being said, operations like MD5 are very crucial to insure the data from one location matches another, which means even more precautious MD5 storing measures. You're also dealing with larger files which means rdiff is almost entirely out of the question.. I could go on and on about different, application specific schemes, but I feel I did good enough with suggesting three different mediums and to have at least two copies of two of them, preferably in 4 different locations.
Re: Backups (Score:3, Insightful)
No.
They are a minimally acceptable backup media for short-term storage.
Consider the fact that with tapes, you really just have to worry about tape errors. If the tape drive fails, you can use another.
With hard drives, you have to worry not only about errors on the drive, but about hardware failures in the electronics as well.
In 10 years, that hard drive will probably be dead no matter what you do. But a properly stored tape backup would still
Re: Backups (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Backups (Score:3, Informative)
Re: Backups (Score:3, Interesting)
All this I wrote in bash in one afternoon.
Re: Backups - some comments (Score:3, Insightful)
2. I'm all about using your f
Re: Backups (Score:5, Informative)
One thing good about paper & film is they withstand decades of storage vs. years of normal magnetic storage. Photos and films from the late 1800's/early 1900's are still around whereas you're really gambling with current storage media.
Re: Backups (Score:3, Interesting)
Wouldn't it be ironic if paper backups were to become the way of the future.
Re: Backups (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Backups (Score:2)
Fire resistant containers protect paper and other common combustibles. However, they do not keep plastics from melting.
That's why you need a media vault or container. [slashdot.org]
Re: Backups (Score:3, Funny)
So, all you really need is a good laser printer and lots of paper. Oh, and some Chinese kids who can type 1's and 0's quickly should you lose something...
Th old fasion way (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Th old fasion way (Score:2)
Number one choice: vellum
Number two choice: papyrus
OR
Longevity measured in decades:
Number one choice: DVD
Number two choice: EIT-3 (tape)
Number three choice: RAID-5 (hard disk)
Number four choice: RAID-5 NAS (disk)
Number five choice: RAIT-5 (EIT-3 tape)
Since you indicated a need for a long term solution, but didn't mention price range, why not consider redundent RAID-5 NAS, which could be platform agnostic?
Re:Th old fasion way (Score:2)
The specific media makes a big difference as well. Look up the NIST study about it. Interesting reading.
Re:Th old fasion way (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't laugh. That's exactly what used to happen in the early, early days of film in the US. For copyright protection, films had to be printed out frame by frame and deposited in the Library of Congress.
In more than one instance, the original film was lost but the paper prints survived - so people just rephotographed the paper pr
what the article is pointing to -- (Score:4, Informative)
Re:what the article is pointing to -- (Score:4, Insightful)
Agreed. I realise tapes aren't the new hotness, but they're the most reliable, and they have good storage capacity. In addition, I'd consider a larger capacity storage server. Together this stuff may not be as cheap as tossing everything on DVDs, but apparently this is for people who work in digital media for a living. From that perspective, its worth investing in your profession.
Perhaps better than slashdot, they're bound to have a huge network of friends in the profession who have already crossed this bridge. It couldn't hurt to ask how people specificaly in these professions manage their media storage.
To expand (Score:5, Informative)
Re:To expand (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, I Frame only MPEG-2. Not uncompressed. Uncompressed is 270 Mbit/s
Re:To expand (Score:3, Interesting)
DV/miniDV has a bitrate of 25Mbps
DVCPRo has a bitrate of 50Mbps
HD DV (if you can find one) has a starting rate of 100mbps
Tape Backup? (Score:2, Informative)
And supplement that with LaCie external firewire drives.
Re:Tape Backup? (Score:5, Informative)
Treat optical media like magnetic media (store in cool dry place) and use high-quality media and you'll get far better results than tape.
Add in the speed at which tape drives become obsolete and tapes hard to obtain, while CD's are still readable. And I've found optical to be a superior archive medium.
If you examine the study cited you'll notice that the study is for optical media in harsh conditions. Additionally they specifically state "It is demonstrated here that CD-R and DVD-R media
can be very stable (sample S4 for CD-R and sample D2 for DVD-R). Results suggest that these media types will ensure data is available for several tens of years and therefore may be suitable for archival uses."
Re:Tape Backup? (Score:3, Informative)
Tape... (Score:4, Informative)
And as long as you store the tape properly, it should last a long time.
Compression (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Compression (Score:3, Informative)
hmm ... (Score:2)
for video back-ups... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:for video back-ups... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:for video back-ups... (Score:3, Informative)
Cost? (Score:2)
Go pick yourself up a xRAID or the like and back all of your files up to a nice RAID 5 system. Once a year or so do a dump to optical media but just add additional space as necessary.
Don't know if this will help but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Don't know if this will help but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Another thought I have is th
My methods. (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a 'cheap' system (sub 500) that acts as my data server. It houses 3 DVDrom drives, and a DVDRW drive, as well 1 200 GB drive. (the processor speed and ram really aren't too important, but for curiousity, it's an athlon 2000+ with 512 meg of ram). It runs gentoo, and I essentially pull the files to burn to DVD over the network weekly, and I keep the stuff I don't access alot on DVD, and the stuff I do access alot on HD -- but I primarily use the HD for holding images waiting to be burned.
USB HD (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:USB HD (Score:2)
Steganography, porn, usenet and google. (Score:5, Funny)
At any time when I need to recover the data, I just use google to find someone with a copy of my data, download, decrypt, and voila!
This is my cheapskate's Network Storage Device!
Re:Steganography, porn, usenet and google. (Score:3, Funny)
*Eats hat* (Score:3, Interesting)
I take back what I said before. I could have sworn it was the other way around.
Never mind.
Re:USB HD (Score:3, Funny)
Well, if you're using 88-bit bytes, I think I see what the problem is.
hard drives are cheap and reliable (Score:2)
200gb drives can be had for under $100 on ebay.
Load them up, remove them and store them in a fire proof safe..
Problem solved..
Memory (Score:5, Funny)
I memorize it.
Re:Memory (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Memory (Score:2)
I encode it into articles that I place on usenet, and then let google act as my archiver.
Long-Term and Short-Term needs (Score:3, Informative)
First, there's the need to keep things around long-term. Second, there's the need to have things protected from disaster in the short term.
I once used an external firewire HD for backup, and was reminded of the importance of burning things as well when that HD went tango-uniform on me, destroying months of work.
I'd suggest looking into some sort of RAID - even just a simple mirror - for the short-term protection. That way you don't have quite as much a single point of failure that can wipe out your data, so you can do backups more because you need the space than because you need to sleep well at night.
As for the backups, optical discs are very convenient, but magnetic tape might have a longer lifetime depending on environmental conditions, and although I've seen CD-R comparisons [pcbuyersguide.com], I've yet to see something similar for DVDs.
There are times where a high-capacity removable hard disk looks very attractive. Shades of the old Bernoulli's or whatever.
(This may not be first post, though there were none when I started. Maybe I'll have to settle for first useful post.)
Streamload (Score:2)
They offer unlimited storage but you pay to download more than a certain amount a month--but if you have hardware failure that leads you to really need it, you probably won't mind paying, or spacing out your downloads.
somewhat obvious solutions (Score:2)
You also could use a tape backup. Any of the results from here [pcmall.com] could do the trick. At work, we use one of the 200/400GB tape drives for backup and are only using about 10-15% of the space (and that's for a dozen servers). We haven't had to test the lifespan of one of these, but tapes typically have an excellent lifespan compared to hard drives or optical media.
Re:somewhat obvious solutions (Score:2, Informative)
1. Human Stupidity, one mistaken format of the raid instead of that USB drive and poof.
2. Localized disasters, Flood, Lightning, Tornadoes, Blizzards, and Fire are all things that will can trash a raid.
3. Human malice, theft, vandalizm, hackers, viruses, worms and the like. Offline storage is less suceptable to these issues.
Storm
RAID (Score:2)
Re:RAID - One more thing.... (Score:2)
tape and hard drives (Score:2)
you probably want to occasionally back up to something that you can store in a lock box away from your house. i guess you could do this with disk drives, but i'd rather use tape. more reliable than optical media and plenty of capacity.
One thing I've never understood... (Score:5, Interesting)
Something about that seems horribly backward.
That said, Exabyte still rocks my socks
Re:Why is that backwards? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyway the big problem with optical is that you can only store 4.7 gigs on a DVDR, which is nothing to this guy. HDD's and Tape are the only possible solutions for this guys problem. I'd go with two HD's on firewire or USB2.0 and storing atleast one of them off site at the end of the day. Tape can be ok too but what is the seek time like on todays tech? If he is looking for one clip is he going to have to ff through the whole tape?
The answer to me seems like some form of software raid setup for write once only to external HD's.
Optical backup (Score:3, Interesting)
And burn a second set of DVD's for actual use, so you don't have to break the seal on the others.
Also, as history shows, storage media will continue to grow in size and decline in price. In five years, he will probably want to re-archive everything, anyway, to condense it down.
You've already got tape backups (Score:2)
The digital images should be more manageable on their own. Buy a couple redundant backup hard drives. or, save them to DVDs, etc.
The cheapest way... (Score:5, Funny)
permastor (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.permastor-us.com/ [permastor-us.com]
Re:permastor (Score:3, Informative)
If you check it out, I offer systems from 80GB to 800GB and this is the effective capacity, not the "marketing" capacity (before RAID utilization). For the 80GB system the $/GB is $5/GB and it scales down to $2/GB for the 800GB system.
The systems provide the same type of reliability technologies that Enterprises use to guard their data, RAID fo
The Obvious Alternative. (Score:2)
RAID+LVM snapshots (Score:3, Interesting)
I use RAID to defend against hardware failures trashing my data, and I use logical volume management snapshots to protect against most user errors.
Neither is perfect. Some hardware failure modes could theoretically kill two or more of my four hard drives at once, which would destroy my data. Large power surges are the most likely danger, so I use a high-quality surge protector. I consider the remaining dangers unlikely enough to accept the risk.
Snapshots are also imperfect. When you create a Linux LVM snapshot volume, you have to specify how much storage is allocated to it. If changes on the source volume exceed that snapshot capacity, the snapshot stops storing the deltas and the snapshot becomes effectively useless. However, the most likely way that I might screw up and trash my data is by deleting large numbers of files. Since deleting files only updates the blocks that store the directory and inode data, not the contents of the files, a relatively small snapshot partition would hold the changes from deletion of all the files on the source. Now, if I were to accidentally run "shred" on bunches of files... I'd be screwed. I choose to accept that risk, too.
Although the RAID+LVM combo doesn't do quite as good a job as "real" backups, its failings are pretty minor, and unlikely, and it's advantage is huge: I don't have to think about it. I don't have to mess with lots of removable media and I don't have to remember to do backups.
The one thing I still worry about is some sort of catastrophe that destroys my whole system. Suppose my house burns down, for example. I'd lose it all. So I still need to find some way to get offsite copies of the most important stuff.
Be careful with external drives for backup (Score:2)
I use a mac mini with firewire drives (Score:2)
a few fire wire drives, the thing is still small and quiet. Then rsync
the data over regularly with a script like
#!/bin/sh
rsync -avzuP -e ssh --delete
and call this by cron. This works reliably also with large files like
vmware workstations or dvd backups with several gig file size. Having the backup
over the network allows having the backup machine in a separate place
which limits the risk (for
Obligatory Linus quote (Score:4, Funny)
RAID! (Score:2)
Of course, like everyone else you'll have to look at the content you create and decide if it's worth the money required to back it up. Establish a cost per gigabyte for each solution, and decide
Disasters (Score:5, Interesting)
Mirror with rsync to 1,000+ GB of disk (Score:2)
I have multiple mirrors, and I rotate between the mirrors, so that on a given day, I have a backup which is 1 day old, 2-4 days old, and a week or so old. On top of that, I periodically take mirrors out of circulation, say, every month or so.
Yes, I have alot of hard drives. However, drives are cheap
Rsync and Dirvish for disk-to-disk backup (Score:5, Informative)
Rsync ( http://rsync.samba.org/ [samba.org] is really great for backup of Unix-like systems. The ability to hardlink identical files allows me to store hundreds of daily full images of 100GB of sources to a single target 250GB hard disk. Rsync is very smart about moving only changed data over the network, resulting in speedups of 10x to 100x. This allows me to do full backup on my offsite colo without using a lot of bandwidth. Note that Rsync is great for Mac/Unix/Linux, but it does sometimes have problems with windoze clients. But then, so do I ...
Dirvish (originally written by jw schultz) is a Perl wrapper around Rsync. It facilitates the scheduling and management of Rsync based backups. We have a fairly active mailing list and contributions from around the world (open source is so cool!).
Backups should be safe against:
Backups should be automatic (or they will not get done) and cheap (hard disks are cheaper than tape, and much cheaper when you use hard linking). Rsync stores the data in a file system closely approximating the original, which facilitates restores.
If a cheap electrolytic filter capacitor dries out in your power supply, and the 5V output decides to start making a 15V squarewave instead, everything in your computer case will get fried. Including every one of the RAID disks. External USB enclosures (or airgaps!) protect against host and power supply failure.
If I was really paranoid about protecting my data, I would run a long ethernet cable to a nerdly neighbor a few houses away, and put a second dirvish server there. While I do rotate my drives into ziplok bags in a fire-resistant safe, the maximum credible accident (a furnace explosion) would tear open the firesafe. If I was paranoid and rich, I would use a high bandwidth VPN connection to a big disk in a colo machine in a different city.
The best backup is server-pull, frequent, automated backup onto multiple R/W media in multiple places, and frequent checking of that data. The closer you can approximate this, the more secure your data will be.
Keith
Optical Reliability (Score:3, Insightful)
The NIST report didn't say optical media were inheritantly unreliable at all; it said that there were big differences in media quality, and that storage conditions were important.
Personally I think hard drives are the pits for data reliability. The drives are good for MAYBE 3 years, subject to all sorts of electrical failures, and even if you have a RAID you still can lose the whole thing due to a {virus,controller,power supply,filesystem,usererror}.
I use redundant MAM-A gold stabilized CD-Rs for my data which were the most stable option in the NIST report. That works great for everything I have including digital photos.
DV might be a pain with CD-R so I would probably start with staggered redundant sliver DVD-Rs until I saw some more data on the lifetime of this media.
No way would I consider hard drives an acceptable archival solution.
Needs (Score:5, Insightful)
This is the pot calling the kettle black, though. Is there a support group out there?
parchive (Score:2)
Archive versus Backup: Know the difference! (Score:3, Informative)
Your computer's own hard drives should keep only what you are actively working on. Get the rest of the stuff out of your way.
Buy GOOD DVDs ... burn all the files you are not actively working with to these - two separate DVDs for each archive, of two different brands. Check for file integrity, label them well and store them in a convenient, off-site location, cool and dark. Delete the originals from the working drive. Check the archive disks fairly often for degradation and re-burn as needed. They are no more labile than negatives and videotape.
For the large files, buy removable drive bays and holders, and copy them onto large hard drives. REMOVE the drives and store them with the DVDs.
On your working system, continue to back up the data for the active projects. Consider getting a RAID 5 system for data integrity, because if you back up data from one drive to another you risk overwriting a good copy with a bad copy.
Parity Files (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Parity Files (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Parity Files (Score:3, Informative)
Depends one which parity program you use. Best bet is to put all of your data in the root folder (zip it up if you have directory trees to preserve) and make a set of parity data using QuickPar. I usually fill 5-15% of the disc with parity, netting me about 4Gb of storage per DVD+/
Back up only the important stuff. (Score:4, Insightful)
When I backup my stills onto dvd I use jpeg 2000, its lossy but really not that bad once the image is in a good state.. I did some tests in college on jpeg/jpeg2000 vs tiff (uncompressed) of the smae image to see how much is lost. Not a lot it turns out. I love uncompressed images, but the loss when storing as jpeg isn't so great to matter unless you do a lot more manipulation. I'm also still shooting film which can always be rescanned at a later date.
However, you shouldn't backup all the DV (raw video) you dump on the computer. The original tap e can act as the backup. its still on the tape even after you dump it into the computer. Label it and set the right protect notch. Voili, instant backup footage.
I'm assuming you edit this down and give the client a dvd/video. Just keep a DVD copy for yourself. Thats all they can really ask you for. If they come back at a later date, because the dvd is bad try yours. If that doesn't work you have to go back to the tape and redit and recharge.
this is actually a BIG question (Score:5, Insightful)
I have been in the same position the Author discussed, and I have come to ONLY negative conclusions. In a few words, and I hate to say this, but buddy:
WE'RE FUCKED.
Digital is a loser's proposition. backing up to analogue or even digital data on analogic substrates (such as DV tape) fail. Simply nad purely.
The *only* thing that comes close is some kind of RAID, and those, even with the plummeting price of storage, are still too expensive given the needs.
Also, a RAID assumes a continuity of several things that are not likely to be continuous:
With Video:
Framerate, number of lines, colour depth, aspect ratio, file format, compression format, Operating system compatibility, etc etc etc. All of these things are variables.
With Audio:
sample rate, compression format, bit depth, file format, etc.
Basically all of it points to very bad places.
I am fairly well convinced that our age will simply disappear. They will find our garbage, the few books not pressed on acidic paper, our paintings (fat lot of good the abstract stuff will mean to them) and drawings, that's about it. the rest will just be shiny little bits of crap in the landfill.
Since we will have used up all the dense energy forms, they will be appalled at the energy requirements just to get the few remaining museum piece devices to work. Archiving the 21st century will be impossible. To the 25th century, the 21st century will be seen as a dark age - not only for the holocaust of the die caused by the failure of the petroleum based economy, but from the simple fact that very little of the information formats we are totally geared into will survive, including this note on /.
His problem of saving personal video is just the tip ofthe iceberg. His problem is the problem of our very civilisation, writ small.
That's why I am abandoning video, and going back to painting. In 500 years, my painting CAN survive. the video simply won't.
RS
Re:this is actually a BIG question (Score:5, Interesting)
In the digital world, there's currently no such thing as an archive. There are backups that last for quite some time, but I seriously doubt any of them will last forever. The only reason any of these backups last so long is because the people creating them put some serious effort into keeping the data safe - and even then, what's to say it's not going to fail tomorrow?
You're right about the 21st century becoming a second dark age. Half the time, it proves extremely difficult to find web-published articles from two years ago, never mind what someone was putting on the web 15 years ago. Servers come and go as those involved become disinterested with the media they created. But, the difference between a print magazine going belly up and a dotcom media source going belly up is that the printed magazine will still exist while the data from the dotcom will likely never be accessible to the public again.
In the case of personal media, digital is a disaster. My grandparents still have stacks of photos documenting their entire lives, as do my parents, as do my parents for me. However, my photo collection currently suffers a gap which will never be recovered, specifically 1997-2000. During those years, I used a digital camera, and I left the photos on a working hard drive for safe keeping - alas, when I went to retrieve some files off of the drive when I wanted to go back and read a paper, I discovered the drive had committed suicide in a year without use. Yeah, that sucks.
Currently, the best way to back up data is RAID - and that's not even backing the data up, it's just making it more persistent. When you move to another machine, move all of the data to the new RAID. Repeat forever. To be extra safe, have a backup RAID just in case the first one suffers from a catastrophe.
Why is digital media troublesome? Books rarely render themselves unreadable while sitting on shelves, and are likewise rarely destroyed when dropped. Carving something into rock requires a bitchin' act of god to get rid of. But the deleting of a file, or the death of a hard drive, can wipe vast amounts of history out of existence, both in a personal and societal sense. Without an ability to permanently archive digital data, none of the data from the digital age will exist in the future.
Re:this is actually a BIG question (Score:5, Insightful)
This may be hard to believe (and I probably sound smug) but there was a time a while ago when the camera hadn't been invented yet, and nobody had any photos at all. We still seemed to survive as a race/civilisation though.
I'd mod you both down as alarmist and uninformed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Books are not such a perminant media as you might think. They wear out, and can be destoryed. A good example is the Mayan Codices. Records seem to indicate there were thousands, however Spanish priests burned them as "works of the devil" during the European conquest of the Americas. Today only 4 remain.
Digital data can be so perminant because it is so easily copied. Perminance of data does not come form trying to make a single, eternal copy, but from having many copies all over the world. Digital data can be copied for essentially zero cost very easily. Thus it's easy to give it a great deal of robustness. Also, as new formats come out, you simply copy and convert the data. I have data on my harddrive today that orignally existed on 5.25" floppy for the Apple II. It has simply been copied and converted a number of times.
Finally, it's not like book are going away. On the contrary we publish millions of works a year amounting to billions of books.
You seem to have a false sense of perminance, as though in the past things were archived forever. That's not the case, actually, most data was lost, that's one of teh reasons we have such an incomplete picutre of history. You don't even know all that was lost, because the record of it even existing, if there was one, is also lost. What has survived is by chance, or by effort, not because we had some wonderful archival system.
You don't have to have something on an immutable, indestructable medium for it to survive. The Nordic Legends weren't written down for centuries, yet today we still have them. They were passed down, as an oral traditon for generations. There was no perminance to them other than stories in people's minds, yet they've durvived thousands of years.
Re: Modding for stupid reasons (Score:3, Insightful)
You like to talk about the bible but realise the immense effort that went in to each copy prior to the printing press. It was an amazing amount of effort to copy all of it and attempt to do it without error. These days,
You're going to laugh, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
These are the only ones I can trust to be around in 100 years or more.
*All* digital images get written to CD-Rs are are stored in a commercial document-control facility. But the ones I really want to keep get written to film.
DV tape is cheap (Score:4, Insightful)
Alternately, all modern NLEs have 'export to tape' functions. Just record your final product back out to your DV deck or DV camera and make a master archive on tape.
How to back up all that data forever? (Score:3, Insightful)
"duh" indeed (Score:5, Insightful)
"Several people have suggested backing up vital unchanging files to DVD (video, images,) and continue backing up frequently accessed files to harddrive"
They've already considered hard drives. Since he's dismissed hard drives and seemingly all forms of optical media, the only thing that I can think of for this article getting posted is that the submitter *really* wants Slashdot to tell him that "Yes, it's ok to mortgage the house to buy that new Network Appliance SAN you've been drooling over."
Re:"duh" indeed (Score:3, Insightful)
The question he really needs to answer is... what is worth more? Losing your data? Or spending $5,000 on a NAS server or a RAID machine?
Re:To a second hard drive? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is to survive a hardware failure &/or increase speed. It
is not meant as a backup device to archive data. Accidentally
delete a file and its gone from your RAID. Accidentally
overwrite a file with same name, the original is toast. Lose
two drives in your RAID array, good chance your data is gone.
As others have said, optical may not be as reliable as once
thought, and is not practical for large files. While tape
suffers from drive obsolescence, the media aging rate is
fairly well known and less random than optical and can be
planned for.
Re:To a second hard drive? (Score:3, Informative)
The price per gigabyte of tape is much lower than hard disks. The large capacity drives are expensive, but in the long run, the higher media cost for hard drives will be even more expensive.
MM
Re:raid (Score:5, Funny)
Except for one server which we don't even own, all of our servers (about 10) are RAID "backed up".
One of these days is gonna be really fun.
Re:raid is not a backup methodology (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:raid (Score:2)
Stick a Linux box with a RAID 5 array (less disk wastage than RAID 1) under the lawn or in a neighbour's house and use permissions to guard against accidental deletion. Your really important stuff goes onto DVD, GMail and the 10GB of space your friend gives you on his FTP server.
Proper backup may be a $3000 tape drive, a whole bunch of tapes and a who
Re:raid (Score:3, Insightful)
This common platitude doesn't hold water. While you can't delete
The rest of your post exactly the point I was making... nobody's arguing that RAID is useless... just that it isn't an effecti
Re:RAID 5 (Score:2)
-Adam
Re:firewire drives and faubackup (Score:2)
why not use RSYNC, its part of every linux box and is easy to use after 10mins of reading the man page.