Subject: Re: La Cie
From: Michael Graeve (michaelgraeve@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Sep 07 2006 - 16:17:11 EDT
Concerning archiving:
Sooo many options, but after spending my summer months looking into this:
A couple of brands of CD's or proper tape backups are ok if you want to keep
stuff in a 'dead' form away from the computer. Retrospect is the main
program that deals with these well.
DVD's have a short lifespan, and are imperfect mediums because they actively
tolerate data errors, so shouldn't be used for archiving, and if you do you
need to reburn them every 18 months, apparently.
In my case I have decided to keep all my information alive on external hard
drives. So I do a bootable duplicate from my laptop to Drive A and then
later backup Drive A to Drive B. Drive A and Drive B are usually in
different buildings. I'm saving up for Drive C. Super Duper is often
mentioned as the favored software for this, but Retrospect and many other
softwares will do this very easily.
I want my information alive and all in one spot, because that is also the
only way I can get my head around what I have where. It's also good then for
migrating formats, say from older to newer formats or file types, in short
to keep things readable.
I use Retrospect despite all its bad press nowadays, because it's the only
program I know of that appears to have a decent file verification function.
(I don't use it's proprietary archiving system, but simply use it to create
Finder readable duplicates).
I understand the following issues with my strategy, which I have decided to
accept:
It is said that hard drives know where (in which sectors) they are becoming
faulty, and don't write to those, so that is good. But data may become
corrupted over time, in which case you won't know what goes wrong when, and
until it's too late. This is doubly a problem because I don't have an
archive set (eg previous versions of a file, kept intact), but only current
live versions. So if a file becomes corrupted, or I delete it, it will
actually be lost.
On the LaCie matter. Lacie are really just re-sellers and packagers of
drives. They don't make their own disks, and my LaCie 160 GB Triple
Interface was a Maxtor drive housed in a LaCie housing. I've now started
buying OWC drives, because they make it clear what drive and interface chip
they use (eg they tell you which Oxford Chip is in there, which you need to
know for it to be 'officially' compatible with Pro Tools). WiebeTech are the
only others that seem to make this information clear.
Good luck,
Michael Graeve
----Original Message Follows----
From: Benjamin Broening <bbroenin@richmond.edu>
Reply-To: cec-conference@concordia.ca
To: cec-conference@concordia.ca
Subject: Re: La Cie
Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 13:19:15 -0400
Having lost two drives (one a La Cie, the other an internal powerbook drive
(gravity)), I am very interested in finding long term solution to backing
up audio data. I am wondering what people on the list do for reliable
long-term backups. RDVD's are reported to be unreliable, hard drives fail..
Right now, I back up to two hard drives, but I'm not sure how well that
will work over the longer term as the amount of data I need to back up
increases....
I'd love to hear how people solve this problem.
best,
Ben
On Sep 7, 2006, at 12:58 PM, Aki Pasoulas wrote:
>>
>
>
>Hi Kevin,
>
>I own one of these, the d2 Extreme 250 GB and I have also lost data three
>times -
>fortunately recoverable through DiskWarrior and also through Norton
>Utilities in my OS9.
>The problem seemed to be in the directories and happened after crashes, so
>there was no
>chance to unmount before shutting down the computer.
>
>back up - back up - back up
>
>Aki
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>___________________________________________________________
>Try the all-new Yahoo! Mail. "The New Version is radically easier to use"
>– The Wall Street Journal
>http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html
>
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