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by Scott Hanselman.
Original Post: The Problem of Peristance: Storing and Backing up One's Life a Gigabyte at a Time
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I had a scare this weekend. Last week I flashed the BIOS on my lovely Intel
Motherboard (you remember, the
one I got last August for a song) and forgot about it. A few days later
I had to reboot for some reason and after the intial BIOS POST...nothing. Just
a non-blinking hard drive light. The weird thing is, if I let the box sit for
an hour, it boots. But, if there's trouble, it won't boot again until I let
it sit.
Needless to say, I was a little concerned as I was trying desperately to burn a series
of DVDs from the seven hours of digital video I shot in Africa.
I shot all these Digtal 8mm tapes then ripped them to my
external firewire drive. It ended up being about 80 gigs of data. When my
C: drive didn't boot, it got me a little panicky and I started thinking about storage.
Here's my setup:
45 gig Western Digital EIDE 7200RPM C: Drive
Contains Windows, my desktop and profile. Also Program Files. No data to speak
of. This is the SYSTEM drive.
The RAID card was the shiznit 4 years ago. It's a FastTrak66. I'm sure
it's obsolete now, but it's non-certified Windows 2000 Drivers work fine in Windows
XP.
This array contains a 4 gig partition called DATA with all My Documents
and Mo's Documents (her My Documents on her machine points here, although she doesn't
know it). While I'm not a fan of partitions, I keep this at 4gig as I figure
that's a good "working size" and it forces me to fit and backup all of the Family's
Documents onto one single-layer DVD. I back this up to a DVD+RW weekly.
The remaining 16 gig partition is called STORAGE and is random.
I consider it secondary but persistant storage. I back this up less frequently,
maybe monthly.
200 gig Western Digital External Firewire Z: Drive
This is the media drive. All my Ripped Music is here, all my Video is here,
and all my Audible Books are here.
75 gig No Name External Firewire Drive
This drive is largely unused. I have used it for a Photoshop Scratch Disk or
for a Virtual Memory Swap file. However, once it freaked out (I'm starting to
not trust Firewire) and can't count on it.
Here's the issue. How do I truly back my life up? As we begin to
collect all this 'Media' how to we protect it?
What to Backup of my Digital Life?
I have a ReplayTV with 80gigs of storage (80
hours of video) but arguably the whole drive is scratch. If I lost it all, I'd
be sad, but hey, it's TV. There will always be more. Certainly I don't
need to back it up.
My C: drive? No worries...well, some, but really, I could pave it and start over,
as the DATA is on the RAID Array. I back up the RAID array weekly onto one
DVD+RW, and put that in an off site location.
But what about the BIG stuff? How do I backup 200 gigs? 50 DVDs?
Not feasible. More and more people are starting to backup their lives on Moving
Magnetic Media, and I'm starting to think it's just a ploy to sell more $50 120gig drives.
No one outside of the enterprise seems to mention Tape Backup for the home.
PC Magazine is much more likely to suggest that the Small Office/Home Office user
buy a Network Storage Device (read: another computer with another hard drive) and
suggest that it be hidden in the closet.
But if I really care about my data, how can I protect it?
I Can't Keep Everything
A good example is this recent rip of 80 gigs of video.
Digital 8mm Source Tapes -> 80 gigs of AVIs -> Nero Vision DVD Project ->
Rendered DVD Image File -> Final DVD
I certainly can't keep 80 gigs of AVIs around, but if I yank them
Digital 8mm Source Tapes -> DELETED -> Nero Vision DVD
Project -> Rendered DVD Image File -> Final DVD
What happens if I have to make a change to the DVD? Since the Project is really
a series of timestamp "pointers" to the original video, do I just rip the video AGAIN
and hope the pointers line up? If I take the advice of the MyLifeBits
guy at Microsoft Research, I'd just keep buying Firewire drives and save
EVERYTHING.
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