[Leica] Consensus on external hard drives

[henningw at archiphoto.com (Henning Wulff)]

Beyond my own needs I've been involved in helping others set up 
backup/archive systems.

My main machine, a Mac, has a 120Gb startup drive and two fast 80Gb 
drives striped RAID drives for Photoshop's use for swap files (and 
some very large interim files) and firewire drives for image storage. 
At present 300Gb drives are in the sweet spot for capacity/dollar 
here, so that is what I get. I put them into inexpensive third party 
(firewire) enclosures, and everything works fine. I generally use 
Seagate drives, as I've had a lot more failed Western Digital and 
Maxtor on a percentage basis, and others are generally not cost 
effective here. This is based on about 100 drives over the past 3 
years. Not a huge number, but good enough for me.

I have used and have experience with about 6 LaCie drives/enclosures. 
The mechanisms are mostly Western Digital (see above) and three of 
the enclosures have had failures of one sort or another, a far higher 
percentage than the other enclosures. I like the look of the LaCie, 
but not the reliability.

I generally have one current drive with images on line. I back that 
up regularly to a similarly sized second drive (I use a utility 
called DejaVu, but there are others that work - NOT Silverkeeper 
which tends to drop files). The file structure is identical on all 
drives except for the jpegs and scans (see below). The second drive 
only gets fired up to do a backup. A third drive also gets a backup, 
but this one is used via Adobe's DNG converter (I shoot almost 
exclusively RAW) so that I have another format. I also put the jpegs, 
scans etc in another folder. When a set of three drives is full, I 
bring one to my wife's office and keep the DNG drive in a fireproof 
safe. The third drive gets used when I need photos from that drive, 
and it gets kept connected (but powered down) at my computer. My 
catalog resides on my main drive, and is done with iView. My main 
drive also gets backed up automatically daily, and manually to 
another drive once a week. The RAID setup doesn't get backed up.

I've had too many experiences with unreadable CD's and DVD's to trust 
them for long term storage.

-- 
    *            Henning J. Wulff
   /|\      Wulff Photography & Design
  /###\   mailto:henningw@archiphoto.com
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