Yeah, I'm a double back up guy. But at the moment that means two external hard drives. In England, power was pretty steady and reliable - hardly ever any power cuts - mostly underground power cables. Here on Vancouver Island, we get at least one power cut a month. Usually because someone drunk has driven into a power pole. Eventually that'll fry one of my drives, or make it fail to boot because it'll be in the middle of writing when it cuts out. They're so ridiculously delicate. I worry that when that happens, I'll go to my second backup and I'll either find that it's failed for any of the other absurd reasons these things fail, or that the power will cut again while I'm loading it or using it. Plus, each time one of these things fails, I have to go and spend $150-200 on another piece of shit backup drive that will fail in another year or so.
So that's why I like the idea of having net backup as second backup. Spreading the risk. And they're probably less likely to go bust than my second drive is to fail. And I'm not saving 2+ TB of stuff to DVD. That's like a whole week spent backing up, changing discs every 10 minutes. One thing I never understand: if the US is so litigation-happy, how come there's not a class-action lawsuit against Lacie? If anybody else made products that shitty and unreliable, and which destroyed people's stuff, they'd have lawyers crawling all over them. Makes me sad to think of the amount of family photos and video, let alone hard work and art, that keep being lost by thousands of people who buy one of these drives and don't know better than to trust them. Like I didn't a few years ago. Sorry. Have shingles. Am in pain and so am grumpy. Bah. On 1-Feb-09, at 8:17 AM, Brook Hinton wrote: I don't trust net backup. I don't trust anyone to stay in business long enough for that to be worth paying for. External drives are so cheap now. It's easy to move a small external drive around so it's almost never in the same place as your system. I try to set up my backup strategy so that my data survives a fire or my being mugged. Beyond that, yes, drives die, equipment fails, but it does so everywhere including the out there in serverland. But the likelihood of two data locations (like a backup drive and a main drive) failing at once is not high. And if it happens, as the zen people say, its an "opportunity for practice", you know, be here now and all that. If I focus more than this on my existing work, I don't make any new work, or I'm too blocked up to make good work. Frankly, the inability to erase traces of work from the net is more troubling to me than the possibility of losing all my data, even though I don't have any desire to erase anything right now. But I have work that HAD I sent it into the cloudosphere, I would now be trying to get rid of it, because my current self hates it. If I ever make more money, I MIGHT add a remote storage facility to the mix. Maybe. But it would probably be a physical delivery thing, not over the wires. Brook _______________________________________________________ Brook Hinton film/video/audio art www.brookhinton.com studio vlog/blog: www.brookhinton.com/temporalab [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] Rupert http://twittervlog.tv/ Creative Mobile Filmmaking Shot, edited and sent with my Nokia N93 [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
