Re: Very Important Point
| October 12, 2006 06:21AM |
Nathan, great posts. I just want to echo something for emphasis:
I haven't gone to archival media yet - I just use disks that aren't the really cheap, no-name media. My entire archive lives on a hard disk array, and the optical media is just a backup. Since I make a full backup every six months or so (yes, that's about 70 DVD-Rs now), I don't worry too much about any individual backup going bad in that short of time. The full backup is only a secondary backup anyway.
The mindset among computer users is that rarely-used files should be removed from your main computer. It's an antiquated holdover from a time when hard disks were expensive - I recall buying a 120MB hard drive in the mid-90s for $120 ($1/M
. Now, drives cost $1/GB - byte for byte, they cost 0.1% of what they used to.
There's no cost reason to delete files from your computer any more - disk space is just too cheap (1MB of disk space is cheaper than 1MB of CD space), and getting cheaper all the time.
1. Leave everything on your hard drive.
2. Get a backup hard drive (most these days come with automatic backup software), and make a full copy of your hard drive regularly.
3. Your next computer will have a larger disk, so you'll probably never run out of space.
4. Online backup services like [strongspace.com] or [bingodisk.com] are another option - they use highly-redundant architectures (like the ones Nathan described) and you can get to your files from any computer.
JAC
I haven't gone to archival media yet - I just use disks that aren't the really cheap, no-name media. My entire archive lives on a hard disk array, and the optical media is just a backup. Since I make a full backup every six months or so (yes, that's about 70 DVD-Rs now), I don't worry too much about any individual backup going bad in that short of time. The full backup is only a secondary backup anyway.
The mindset among computer users is that rarely-used files should be removed from your main computer. It's an antiquated holdover from a time when hard disks were expensive - I recall buying a 120MB hard drive in the mid-90s for $120 ($1/M
. Now, drives cost $1/GB - byte for byte, they cost 0.1% of what they used to.There's no cost reason to delete files from your computer any more - disk space is just too cheap (1MB of disk space is cheaper than 1MB of CD space), and getting cheaper all the time.
1. Leave everything on your hard drive.
2. Get a backup hard drive (most these days come with automatic backup software), and make a full copy of your hard drive regularly.
3. Your next computer will have a larger disk, so you'll probably never run out of space.
4. Online backup services like [strongspace.com] or [bingodisk.com] are another option - they use highly-redundant architectures (like the ones Nathan described) and you can get to your files from any computer.
JAC
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488 stops for water at Los Pinos tank on closing day Oct. 1979. Photo courtesy Don Richter
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