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[Reply #15 on:]

It's a fail. If you only have time to listen to one song at a time, how will you ever know which ones are your favorites?

Easy, its whatever Apple tells you it is.

[Reply #16 on:]

Easy, its whatever Apple tells you it is.

I see what you did there.

[Reply #17 on:]

The first hard drives I used were back in my professional Apple II days, these big, noisy, voice coil 5Mbyte Western Digital unit.
About the size of a breadbox! They were soooo loud you had to have them in another room!
They interfaced to the Apple II's with 50 way ribbon cable, I ran miles of the stuff in schools, offices and factories.
It cost around AUS$4000.

Then Corvus bought out a system with a 10Mbyte drive that used twisted pair, that made life easier and a bit quieter.
It cost around AUS$2500.

A while later IBM went from PC to XT and we had the joys of MFM (Manual Format Mayhem/Madness)
Remember running DEBUG, executing the bit of code on the controller card to format a 5M drive?

I got by for ages with my Mac Plus having only a 20M or 40M harddrive, tons of floppy backups!
Now my Mac Plus has a 320M drive!

The other day I bought a couple of 32Gbyte SD cards for AUS$60 each!
SDXC cards a coming, they are going to be 2Tbyte!!

Now when I'm going through the rather large collection of SD cards I have, every gadget I have uses them, I keep thinking of those little coloured, square "disks" you used to see Spock using in Star Trek.

[Reply #18 on:]

What I ultimately want isn't more space, but more reliability for the space I have. Or a more reliable backup system that doesn't cost an arm-n-leg.

Last year, I had my fileserver die on me; I managed to recover all the data (nothing lost), but I had to migrate to a new set of drives. Sometime this year, I plan on migrating to a new box entirely. I've been thinking about buying a 1-2 Tb hard drive for backup purposes...

None of this makes any sense to me; if they weren't so expensive, a few large SSDs might be perfect (ok, they're not really that expensive, compared to what I remember spending for a 1 gig bigfoot drive back in the day!), but their long-term longevity hasn't been proven, AFAIK...

I just want a solution that I can put the data on, move it around, and not have to worry about -ever- losing it (short of a major catastrophy); the closest thing available that I can come up with is some form of RAID'd NAS, and even that's not foolproof...

 

[Reply #19 on:]

I'm not saying I have an alternative beyond writing to tape or burning DVD's and Bluray (I'm still the only one I know with a Bluray burner), but I keep telling my clients,

BACKING UP TO MEDIA THAT HAS THE SAME RELIABILITY AS THE MEDIA YOU ARE BACKING UP IS NOT A BACK UP,

IT IS A COPY!

I keep getting asked to get my "magic wand" out to recover so called back up drives.

Seriously, for photographs and video, burn it to disk! Or write it to tape!

At least twice!

You can always recreate code, go buy that CD again, download application notes or whatever,
but for important stuff like photo's, video, your thesis,

Burn it to disk!

[Reply #20 on:]

Of my 6TB of external drives 4TB is backups (sorry copies ) and 2TB of that is offsite (well in the car which is as good as I can do).

Photos (I'm a photographer) are also on DVD at least twice (RAW and processed) but also the good ones exist several times on seperate DVDs.

______
Rob

[Reply #21 on:]

With most Linux distro's you get a groovy utility that lets you use your DV camera as a tape back up.
Works really well, mini-DV or DV8!
You get about 8 gig on a 60 minute tape, which is fortunate, cos most of my disk space is taken up with DV!

You should get a Blueray burner! AUS$25/25gig single sided or AUS$50/50 gig double sided.

That way I'll be able to share with at least 1 other person on the planet!

[Reply #22 on:]

You should get a Blueray burner! AUS$25/25gig single sided or AUS$50/50 gig double sided.

I may do soon, I got a 5:1 reduction when I moved from CD to DVD, another 10:1 would be great.

BTW, I write the date on all disc and refresh them every few years as well. (well when I get around to it of course).

______
Rob

[Reply #23 on:]

I back up 1st of every month!
2 copies, stored in different spots.

It's not like I've super glued my camera to my paw, but almost!

Google Jupiter Creek

Or search on YouTube for Jupiter Creek or Echunga

[Reply #24 on:]

I just want a solution that I can put the data on, move it around, and not have to worry about -ever- losing it (short of a major catastrophy); the closest thing available that I can come up with is some form of RAID'd NAS, and even that's not foolproof...

Cloud storage.  Big, cheap and reliable.

[Reply #25 on:]

Cloud storage.  Big, cheap and reliable.

Yeah - let someone else deal with your backups.

[Reply #26 on:]

Google Jupiter Creek

The first listing is www.­jupitercreekmusi­c.­com but that link was down when I tried.

Anyway if you're in SA you might like to drop in on http://ozelecforum.com/index.php, a small electronics forum populated mostly with Aussies and half of them from SA.

______
Rob

[Reply #27 on:]

BACKING UP TO MEDIA THAT HAS THE SAME RELIABILITY AS THE MEDIA YOU ARE BACKING UP IS NOT A BACK UP,

IT IS A COPY!

Semantics.

Burn it to disk!

Writable and rewritable CD and DVD disks have a very short life, in archival terms.  They're good for maybe 5 years.

Burn those important files to a DVD, then pull that DVD out in a few years when the primary media (hard drive) fails, you are likely to get a rude surprise.

-j

[Reply #28 on:]

Writable and rewritable CD and DVD disks have a very short life, in archival terms.  They're good for maybe 5 years.

Absolutely this. I won't use optical discs for backup again. 
I put my mp3 collection onto about 20 CDs in the early noughties, about half of them are readable now.

My step-mother uses an old apple for her accounts and diligently backs up her work onto a zip disc.  I've pointed out a couple of times that if the machine fails she'll have some difficulty finding anyone with a zip drive to restore her archive from.

[Reply #29 on:]

My step-mother uses an old apple for her accounts and diligently backs up her work onto a zip disc.  I've pointed out a couple of times that if the machine fails she'll have some difficulty finding anyone with a zip drive to restore her archive from.

What you don't realize is, as the tech guy, it is your responsibility to get on eBay, buy a zip drive, and load her backups