HW: Alien Autopsy

[Paul Mather]

On Jul 20, 2009, at 1:35 PM, Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:

> On 20 Jul 2009, at 08:23 , Steve wrote:
>> I had two CDRs of rarities from one of my favorite bands die on me  
>> and boy was that distressing.  Hard drive space is cheap these days  
>> I'm thinking of taking FLACs of everything irreplaceable and  
>> keeping two active copies of it (cross copying between 2 separate  
>> computers).  Last time I checked consumer/home backup technology  
>> was lagging hard drive space rather badly....
>
>
> I thought hard drive space _was_ now consumer/home backup  
> technology! :)
>
> All the CDs and other music I had in the UK is crammed losslessly  
> onto a little under 680 GB of hard drive, but I just recently got  
> the rest of my CDs from the US, and have 2 1TB drives at the top of  
> my list of things to get; one for storage, one for backup.  I can  
> get them for about 250 USD, which is a small price to pay next to  
> replacing all that music.  Sure, a house fire could wipeout my main  
> drive and the backup drive, along with the CDs (which are now  
> effectively their own backup medium), but then a house fire could  
> always have wiped out my CDs or vinyl or whatever.  Putting  
> everything lossless on HDs I think makes my whole collection safer  
> and more accessible than ever.

It makes your whole collection more accessible but probably not safer.

If you do go the "primary + backup" drive route, remember a couple of  
salient points:

1) Consumer drives are getting larger all the time but are also  
suffering from ever poorer engineering, hence earlier failures;
2) External drives (USD, FireWire, etc.) don't support S.M.A.R.T.  
reporting, hence no forewarning of impending drive failures;
3) Increased areal density has lead to an increase in silent data  
corruption;
4) RAID is not a backup strategy;
5) Physical damage is not the only way to lose data.

Be proactive and scrub often!  Use checksums and test them!  (Buy TREV  
and kev's latest release!;)

One possibility to consider is to use an online backup such as Mozy or  
Amazon S3 as your backup drive.  (Be sure to read the SLA very  
carefully!)  That way, you can offline your storage and disaster  
recovery headaches to someone else.  (The downside is that it is more  
expensive than a DIY consumer solution, but who said enterprise-level  
solutions necessarily came cheap?:)

Cheers,

Paul.