My original comments concerning using external hard drives for long-term
storage still hold.  All responses here seemed about frequent short-term
usage.  How will they work after not being used for, say, 15 years, a not
unusual period of time between placing audio into an archive and bringing it
out for retrieval.  I'm still dubious indeed.

Anyone have experience firing up a computer after a 15 year period of
inactivity?

Steve Smolian



----- Original Message -----
From: "Richard L. Hess" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 8:26 PM
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Audio storage on external hard drives


> At 06:12 PM 2/21/2005, Scott Phillips wrote:
>>Richard,
>>
>>..are you using RAID disk technology for storage, and if so , what RAID
>>level ? This certainly is a consideration....
>
> Hi, Scott,
>
> Welcome to ARSC List!
>
> If I had more money, I would be using RAID, but the costs of doing that
> right now are higher than the approach I've taken.
>
> I use ViceVersa Pro to automatically sync the work folders that new stuff
> goes in, and I use Ghost to grab a snapshot of the operating environment
> on
> each of the PCs.
>
> So, in essence, my system will be close to a RAID 1 (full mirroring), but
> separated by two brick walls and 20 feet.
>
> Ideally, each of the two stores would be RAID 5, but that is much more
> expensive.
>
> I'm using a LaCie Ethernet Disk as my basic NAS box and I am trying to
> order a second without paying an arm and a leg penalty for being in
> Canada.
> They are 0.5TB native with two 250G drives in it. I have four Maxtor 250GB
> "One Touch" external drives that will be two on each in the final setup.
> Right now, all four are on one LaCie and are being mirrored in that
> configuration.
>
> The nice thing about the Ethernet Disk is the firewire port. I can add a
> LaCie RAID array to it to replace the Maxtor drives at some point.
> http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10595
>
> The Ethernet Disk itself is at
> http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10587
>
> So, no, I'm not using RAID officially, just the concept of full mirroring
> of one NAS store into the other.
>
> It's possible to lose things, but not much will get lost. The sync is done
> nightly. Some items are cloned the first time to the mirrored store, but
> are not updated. Samplitude changes the date and time of some of the files
> without actually changing the file. Since I edit in virtual mode or make
> new files when I edit WAV files, I don't ever do destructive editing on
> WAV
> files, the original version of each file name is kept in the second
> mirror.
> In this way, I'm guarding against corruption of the WAV file. I do the
> same
> with Nikon RAW images. I might lose my parameter adjustment, but I don't
> lose the raw capture. I also do that with JPEGs from the other digital
> cameras, so if someone edits and crops the image, I back that up in one
> place, but keep the original camera JPEG someplace else.
>
> So for audio, the VIP files (the virtual projects) will be cloned and I'm
> looking into keeping a complete daily history snapshot of these as well.
> These are the ones that hold all the edits and they are small.
>
> It's all rather complex and rule based, but it needs to be. When one
> person
> is dealing with the IT from the audio business, finance records, email, 2
> kids' homework, image files from five digital cameras operated by four
> people, and soon a good slide scanner, the data just piles up. I can't
> afford to manage it manually, all I can do is monitor the automatic
> management. Oh, and the second LaCie won't have any public shares. I'll be
> running ViceVersa Pro on it in "pull" mode and it will be a "dark box" on
> the network other than my ability to remote desktop into it behind my SPI
> hardware firewall. I'll either push stuff out of it if needed or set up
> one
> share to drop files into, but I think no share is better.
>
> I've spent about fifty hours this week on the backup. Nice thing about
> having the flu--everything else was too annoying.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Richard
>
>
> Richard L. Hess                           email: [log in to unmask]
> Vignettes
> Media                           web:   http://www.richardhess.com/tape/
> Aurora, Ontario, Canada             (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX
>
>
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>



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