Digital BW, The Print

Sorry to be just chiming now but I have not been following the whole thread.  That said I have worked with computers for over 45 years, 30 years with the FRB in Washington.  We handled massive amounts of data.  I learned the hard way, while still at the FRB, that hard drives fail.  And the systems group backup of my machine had not been working.  I had to make up 3 weeks of work plus all emails were lost permanently.  

On my PC here at home I have software that does a mirror backup of my primary drives to external drives every 6 hours.  Mirror backups, IMHO, are the only way to go.  Proprietary format catalogs are risky.  Companies go out of business or abandon software. With a mirror copy I can unplug an external drive, simply plug it into any old other PC and be able to read it.  I keep 2 sets of external drives.  One is for current backup and one in the safe deposit box at the bank.  I swap the sets once a month.  

I use Acronis to back up the OS (total C Drive mirror).  I use ViceVersa to back up the 3 data HDDs.  I have used these 2 programs for years with out any problems.  I have used the Acronis backups of the OS to recover from varous OS problems including viruses.

When and that is not if, a drive dies I simply go out and buy a replacement and plug it in. 

I hope this is of some help.
BertGF 


--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, Paul Roark <roark.paul@...> wrote:
>
> Truman,
> 
> My research brought me to about the same place.  Are the Haswell chips
> being used yet?
> 
> 
> Truman Prevatt <tprevatt@...> wrote:
> 
> ... statistics show that with mechanical drives larger than 1 TB the live
> > expectancy for a drive is about 18 to 24 months.
> 
> 
> That sucks.  Maybe that is why Dell no longer stocked the 1.5 TB drive I
> had in the box.  The replacement they had is one TB.
> 
> 
> 
> >  ... Macbook Pro Retina display with 16 GB of memory and a 512 SSD.  It is
> > very capable ...  The raid is used for all the photo storage.  The beauty
> > of the thunderbolt buss is you can daisy chain multiple devices.
> >
> 
> Macs seem to use a proprietary version of the Thunderbolt.  I will probably
> wait for the more generic versions to hit the market (as well as the
> Haswell).
> 
> 
> > ... I am quite happy with this setup and it also minimizes losing
> > something important.
> >
> 
> Do you have any off-site backup?  I've never lost anything to fire, but
> always lived in fire-prone areas.  So, like with earthquakes, it's a risk I
> try to prepare for.
> 
> Thanks for posting.
> 
> Paul
> www.PaulRoark.com
> 
> 
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>