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Best Way to Back Up Photos and Video?
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!"
Use a RAID 5 array, keep a replacement drive handy, and watch the drive temperature.
Sure, but how do you automate optical backups? Most people aren't willing to sit there swapping out media for the duration of a full backup. 200GB of data would take, what, 25 DVDs? Is this really practical when you could fit all that on a single tape?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
That'd work really well for the pictures, but what about the videos?
Flip books!
--Pat / zippy@cs.brandeis.edu / pics / blog