Larry, For photos, consider storage in the cloud. Smugmug.com allows unlimited photo storage for an annual fee. There are also paid versions of Google's Picasa that provide large amounts of storage. The disadvantage is that it will take a really long time to upload (or download) 200 GB, but keeping it updated is not so bad, and it's one of the few solutions that protects you in event of a disaster like fire, flood or tornado.
Smugmug has some other features of interest to professionals. Jungledisk, which uses Amazon S3 on line storage, lets you store more than just photos. For local storage take a look at drobo.com. It's like RAID for the masses, allows you to use drives of mixed size, provides data redundancy, and allows you to hot-swap drives as they fail. Combining redundant local storage with on line storage is as safe as you can get. py On Tue, Sep 2, 2008 at 3:03 PM, Larry Sacks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Not to jump into the RAID vs No-RAID fray... but I seek a relatively > easily managed data backup solution. I've got a photography business > and am trying to keep photos from various shoots around. At this point, > I'm mostly looking for the hardware answer. I'll worry about the > software side of things down the road. > > My first solution was to keep copies of photos on 2 separate hard > drives. I would just copy entire folders over to each drive although > that was cumbersome since I didn't always copy the folders to the 2nd > drive as they were created. I also use an external hard drive (USB) > (that I keep off-site) that I only power on when I need to either > recover something or add to it. > > A little over a year ago, I bought a WD My World Book II that offered 1 > TB of storage. Out of fear of a single-point of failure (and before I > saw any of the RAID discussion here), I set it up as a RAID (mirrored). > > > Even though the MTBF's of hard drives is getting into years or > decades.... over the weekend, the drive management console for the World > Book informed me one of the two drives had failed. I've got it powered > off now and don't want to power it back on again until I have the drive > replaced and the mirror rebuilt - even if it's just a stop-gap > procedure. Basically, I'm worried the other drive will crap out and > I'll be left with a paper weight. > > I'm open to suggestions for data backup? I can't (or won't) rely on > just 1 hard drive. DVD backups are a possibility, as are CD. > > I'm currently using about 200 or so gb disk space. > > Online data backups are a possibility, although cost per month is > something I need to factor in as well. > > Thanks, > > Larry > > > ************************************************************************* > ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** > ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** > ************************************************************************* > ************************************************************************* ** List info, subscription management, list rules, archives, privacy ** ** policy, calmness, a member map, and more at http://www.cguys.org/ ** *************************************************************************
