External Hard Drive

[lucian]

Well, Office Max had a special on Western Digital External Hard Drives. I got a 120GB version. It's USB2 and backwwards compatible with USB 1.1.

Regular $179, after rebates $119.

A friend who is a computer tech, and keeps my system running, had a hard drive crash. He lost all his data files. So, I'll start backing up my data files this week.

[Mac]

This is not a bad idea. I run 2 firewire external drives, one of which is a backup drive. But I also keep them on DVD just to cover bases. Just watch for the signs of a drive failing. If you see it coming, then you can get your files off before it goes. As for an all out unforseen crash...that sucks, but can happen to anyone. I keep 3 copies of my files...2 hard drives and 1 DVD...

[musthavemuzk]

you are just a GEEK Mac.
:D

i just wing it.
and hope for the best.
WD main drive and Seagate second drive. both 80 gig
have a WD 40 and 30 but they are just hangin out now...
i am thinking i will need a large drive for pics after i get my DRebel though...

knockin on wood now

Monty

[Stuart Elflett]

I now have two 40 gig externals, both full of backed up images, and a set of everything on DVD too, kept at work... after losing the laptop, and having to pull everything back off cd's, I'm happy to just buy extra drives and put them in the external shells, as need be...

Cheers,
Stuart

[musthavemuzk]

drives nowadays are cheap.
the shells to make them external are cheap too.
buy a drive and a shell and you can have lots of external drives for cheap...

Monty

[Augie]

Hey, this might be a totally off-the-wall-statement, bbut if you burn a cd of thes images what the hell do ya' care if the hd crashes? :cry:

[Stuart Elflett]

One good reason, learned by bitter experience... putting them all back onto hd from cd is a painful task... not a lot of point having images and no access to 'em...

Cheers,
Stuart

[Mac]

Well my DVD's stay away from the house...usually at my parents. This way if something should happen to the house or computer (knock on wood) then I have a safe copy elsewhere. Also, as the saying goes "Better safe then sorry" :-D

[Nomar]

Just watch for the signs of a drive failing. If you see it coming, then you can get your files off before it goes.

what are the signs?

[Ralph Newman]

High temperature, breathing heavy, raise pulse rate, increased pressure,..... you know the usuall things!! :-)

[Nomar]

LOL I wanted to say something along those lines but thought I would be serious for a moment. But I am still curious 'cause I think I have some missing folders on my external HD. I know they were there a while back but now I can't find them. All of the folders that I had named are there but it seems like I have lost some that held pics I tranfered from the camera without putting them in their proper folder.

[Mac]

The most common things you will notices with a "dying" drive is first off, new noise, like ginding...this is the time to move everything you can. But there are the little things that you should notice first, high temps as ralph said being one, but longer seek times and corrupted files...notorious are missing dll's (not to scare people, because it is in windows' nature to have bad dll's I think, but when you get ALOT of them along with other signs, then it might be a concern). It is one of those things that while using your computer you will feel something isn't right...if you get that feeling, run some diagnostics and see what you get. The best way I deal with important files is regular back ups. I do it once a month, and if I go out and shoot alot of pictures I know I want to keep safe, I will back them up right away. But as Monty said above, I am a geek and have A LOT of geek toys lying around that help me with the back issue...:-D

[sfaust]

And there are also the times when you head a noice, and seconds later its dead! Totally dead, with no warning. Ouch!

I'm with Mac. I have a internal 200gb drive for all my current working images, and a second 200gb external backup drive with software that mirrors the two drives to keep them in sync every few hours. All the imgaes that don't fit on the 200gb drives are written off to CD and DVD, and I have two copies of each with one of them bring off site. I also make the CD's soon after dumping the images to my disks from the camera, so even the images on the 200gb drives have two identical CD counterparts. I can withstand everything execpt a direct nuclear hit which wipes out Boston (me) and Cape Cod (my mothers off site copies :-D ).

I am surprised that his computer tech wasn't running backups!!!! I don't know of anyone in the industry that would do that (spent 20yrs in computer software engineering & networking). Ouch! He really should have know better.

Anyone running without backups is going to loose it all at some point. Its just in the cards. At minimum, spend the $150-$200 and put in a separate internal drive, and use that to copy your files over for backup automatically as you work. No effort hassle moving stuff around, but at least you will have 2 copies. Its the absolute minimum I would recommend. At least if your drive dies, you accidently delete your files, or someone else does, you'll still have all your data on the second drive. You still have some exosures, but your covered for most failures at least.

[Mac]

Hey sfaust, what software do you use to mirror the two drives???

[Ralph Newman]

Raid 5??

[lucian]

My computer tech buddy normally backs up on a regular basis. But about this time frame there was the daughter that was getting married, a vehicle that broke down and a couple of out of town business trips in between. It was a rough month. It could have been much worse.

I finally took the external HD out of the box today. I know, I know...

Anyway I backed up all my data files. My imaging folder alone took about 45 minutes to copy everything. I'll be sure to back up at least once a month, sooner if I have images that are important.

[Mac]

I have never ran a raid config (yet...new system I want to Raid a pair of SATA drives), but is it possible to raid an external drive with an internal??? If it is, then I am going to have to look into it a little more...:-D

[sfaust]

Hey sfaust, what software do you use to mirror the two drives???

Its called SecondCopy. You can schedule it to copy or mirror in the background. Its very flexible, but its a small one or two person company, and the last time I spoke with them it sounded like they were letting it go by the wayside. For a long term solution, there might be better choices. But for the next 5 years, or until a few more major operating system releases, it should work fine. I'm very happy with it so far, and have been running it for about 5 years.

[Mac]

Cool. I have a few different programs here that do imaging...I could write a small program to run it after a specific time period I suppose...

I should first check and see if any of them with do it already...thanks for the info sfaust...:-D

[sfaust]

All you really need is something that will copy only new or modified files to the external disk. While SecondCopy is a nice implementation (its shareware also, and cheap), there are quite a few software packages out there that do this. Probably a number of them as freeware, and that could save you from having to code it yourself.

[Mac]

Well for one of my projects in my last semester, I wrote a code that searched the drive and looked at the percentage of new or non-modified files, if that amount exceeded 30%, it would use Drive Image to image the drive. So it would not be that hard for me to modify that code to do it on a time lapse.

But yeah, I quick search would probably show several programs that do the same thing...

[dutchalltheway]

Hey, this might be a totally off-the-wall-statement, bbut if you burn a cd of thes images what the hell do ya' care if the hd crashes? :cry:

Augie...that is exactly what I thought when I started to read this thread...but a lot of these guys have 1000's and 1000's of pictures, making it a time consuming thing to trasfer many, many CD's... :-) I do use an external drive, but do not have a percentage of pictures (yet) as mot of the guys/girls have here.... :-)

[Landis]

For Macs, a great backup program is RETROSPECT. I have mine do an auto backup every night while I sleep and it just does what every changes are made during that day.

I use TECH TOOL PRO for maintenance and it has a part that checks your HD and warns you before it fails. I had it tell me "Fiailure Soon!" a while back. It was correct, as the HD went south three days later.

I don't buy a HD that is less than 200 gigs. They fill up faster than you think.

Always something to suck your money away!!! :(

[Arctirus]

I have all my photos on hardware mirrored drives and I also keep a copy of them on a usb2 hard drive that I lock in a drawer at work. Even if my house burns down I have all my photos. It probably wouldn't hurt for my to make an annual dvd archive to put in a safe deposit box as well.