Mini-Hard Drive Farm

As you may know I'm a bit of a digital pack rat.  What this means is that I keep a lot of backups.  And often backups of backups.  In fact, I have some backups going as far back as 1997 of stuff like archived email, pictures, and other assorted digital nicknacks.  Every so often though I'll go through and start chucking the disks in the trash as I really can't find a reason to keep a version of Netscape Navigator 2 around any longer.  Despite these occasional "cleaning" efforts I still have a rather large collection of optical disks (both CD and DVD) that have a bunch of stuff on them.

In the past I've relied on optical disk storage, first CDs then DVDs, as the price per backed up megabyte was fairly cost effective.  The past couple of years though have seen a dramatic decrease in the price per megabyte of hard disk storage drop like the proverbial stone.  As a result I've been picking up a few external drives for storage duties as well as looking at offsite, online backup solutions.

As a general rule I like to have at least one backup copy of stuff here with me on either an optical disk or, preferably, an external hard drive (multiple hard drives in some cases) as well as at least one copy of "important" stuff off site.  I've been burned too many times by loosing stuff to a primary computer hard drive failure.

At the moment my current "hard drive farm" consists of:

• 500GB Western Digital My Book (circa 2007) formatted to NTSF for Windows related duties
• 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black SATA hard drive in an external USB 2.0 enclosure formatted to Mac OS Journaled
• 1.5 TB Samsung Story external USB 2.0 hard drive formatted to Mac OS Journaled
• 2 TB Western Digital Elements external USB 2.0 hard drive formatted to Mac OS Journaled

I'm getting ready to add another 500GB external drive by taking the old hard drive I pulled from my old desktop and putting it into an external enclosure and that will be formatted to NTFS for Windows uses as well.

My all new digital plan is to use the 1TB external as a DVD ISO storage unit.  I rip all my DVDs to ISO images so that I can mount them virtually whenever I want to watch a DVD.  This way I do not have to worry about swapping disks all the time as well as making it easy to "rip" them for watching on either my HTC Evo or iPad.  The newest drive, the 2TB Western Digital drive is being used as a Time Machine backup for my iMac with backups set for every couple of days.  The 1.5TB Samsung is a general use storage device for day to day use.  The current 500GB Western Digital and the future 500GB external, which are formatted for Windows, are used to house files for Windows 7 so that I do not have to use up too much primary hard disk space on my iMac for Boot Camp.  The main limitation on those two is that I cannot write to them from within the Mac OS unless I fire up VM Ware Fusion.

For offline storage I use a combination of services.  For the iMac's hard drive I use Carbonite.  For less than $60 per month I'm able to back up my entire internal hard drive off site.  For pictures I use Carbonite (they are on the primary hard drive after all) and I also upload post edited pictures to Flickr.  For less than $25 per year I have unlimited uploads and it's a nice way to both share my pictures AND have secured backups of them.

I cannot stress enough to friends and family how important a proper backup strategy is to protecting your valuable digital content in this digital age!

What Will We Lose?

Thanks to a couple of recent hard drive failures it has struck home just how dependent we are becoming upon digital media.  What do we stand to lose?

In the last ten years digital camera sales have exploded while film camera sales and processing have dropped like the proverbial rock.  Home movies are now shot digitally then edited and stored on our home computers.  The recent spat between Google and various book publishers have brought to light the state of the written word being converted to digital media.  The success of the iPod and iTunes music store, along with others, has led to people keeping their music in digital form (ok, for the most part a there are still a few purists out there who want high fidelity sound).  Essentially we're becoming slaves to the digital age.

I cannot sit here and throw stones!  I cannot remember the last time I had to load film in a camera to go picture taking.  In the last five years I've purchased only two music CDs and my entire music collection has long been in digital form.  I still prefer to get my movies on DVD but nine out of ten times I'll convert the movie to either an ISO image to store on a hard drive to mount "virtually" or to a video file to watch on my computer.  In the past two years I've moved almost entirely to reading my books in an ebook form via software on my computer of smartphones.

The benefits of going digital are many.  Collections take up less physical space and I can carry a lot more with me on a day to day basis.  At the current moment I have around 1000 songs on my phone as well as 28 books and a few videos.  In the past seven weeks I've snapped 203 pictures with my phone.  I was not able to schlep around that much stuff on a daily basis just ten years ago, at least not with any ease!  If I were to pack the Macbook up with me I could carry hundreds of times more digital "stuff" with me.  Clearly I've embraced the digital lifestyle.

Of course the downside is that at a moment I could lose a lot of that digital "stuff" with a hard drive failure as what happened twice in the past year.  I've become a big believer in having multiple backup options!  As I mentioned in my last post I'm getting a large external hard drive that will be dedicated to nothing but backups and I'm signing up for a year worth of backups at Carbonite.com.  I do not intend to be caught flatfooted again!

There is another thing to worry about with the move to digital media and that is Digital Rights Management (DRM).  On the music front I think that the Amazon.com music download store did more than any other entity to ease those restrictions.  The downside to DRM is that if for what ever reason the company you buy your media from (music or movies) decides to shut down their DRM servers you are stuck with a lot of content you can no longer enjoy.  And it's not just the company you buy from that can stab you in the back, it can be the content provider.  A case in point for me is with Amazon.com and their video download service.  When it first started up two years ago I was a big buyer of their videos in the form of TV shows I love.  Then there came a point when I had a computer failure and had to do a complete reinstall of the operating system.  I was diligent in keeping the Amazon videos on a second hard drive so I didn't loose the downloads but when I tried to view one of them I could not.  The studio who produced the video no longer allowed people to authorize their machines to view that content.  That was the last time I purchased a downloaded video from Amazon.

I could go on and on about how you can lose your content.  I won't even begin to discuss file formats and how one can be sure what can be played today will be able to be played in just a few years time.

It boils down to this.  Be sure you backup your information both locally and off site.  If you don't there will come a day that you will lose something valuable to you.