Hey eski?

You said you image your hdd on a regilar basis.

Well what do you use? Cds? Hdds?

I am asking because I have 2 hard drives in my pc:
1x 160GB Seagate SATA
1x 120GB Seagate EIDE

Both are full so cds are out of the question for me, I currently just pickup a few 200gig hdds ever 6 months or so to backup.

Do you have any other suggestions?

How are tape drives? Or any other media sutable for archiving purposes?

Edit: Some corrections

Edited by - banjokazooie2000 on 5/31/2004 2:42:12 AM

Banjo - Someone remembered what I said *sniff* . Essentially, I can't be bothered forking out $95 for another WD HDD to image on to, so I use Norton Ghost to make images of my C: drive on my second partition. Of course, this will not help much if the drive dies on me, but I back up my important stuff to CDs. Anyway, to answer your question, tape drives are very reliable, but they can be expensive. In fact, an OEM Internal Seagate 240GB tapedrive was retailing at $4950 when last I checked. Still, you could get a cheap one and buy heaps of tapes. The tapes are reliable, and good quality ones can be used for archiving. You can get 24GB tapes for around $30 each, but 240GB tapes are around $1,200 each (archive quality). The only other thing that I can think of, is NAS (network) storage, as they can get as big as 120GB, but they are more than $2,000, and have superfluous features such as print servers, etc. For you, with 200GB/month to backup, it is hard to say what would be best, as I do not know what your budget is. DVDs and CDs are out of the question as you said, as are ZIP disks, so you don't have that many options for backups of that size, so HDDs are probably the way to go. What do you download anyway?

Taw may have more suggestions.

Edited by - esquilax on 5/31/2004 3:29:34 PM

Thanks for the reply eski.

I have only skimmed through some tape backup prices. They did seem expensive indeed.

I cant wait till the blue light dvds come out. (Maybe after 6months on the shelf they will get down to under $3 a disk. Maybe 1.5years from now)
I think I read that they hold about 20 gigs each. Not to bad.

I guess for the mean time I will continue to use harddrives as they last quite a while, and hold alot of info.

What do I download?
If you mean p2p I do not use it. Not with all the legal suites all over the place!
I do download lots of service packs and utilities.

I store tons of info for projects I work on. I use photoshop quite a bit.
My photoshop folder is over 70gigs. Alot of the images I work on are about 3500x2500px at 300dpi with about 50-60 layers. Each file I save is about 200megs in size, and I save VERY often (Dont want to make a mistake and not have it saved before the change!)

I also image alot of cds to my hdd so I dont have to rifle through my stacks of spindles every 5mins.

Edited by - banjokazooie2000 on 5/31/2004 11:07:37 PM

Fair enough. Blue laser DVD will be great, and I think that it might be closer to 25GB/disc that 20GB but I could be wrong. Still, they are in production, but the drives will be too expensive for quite a while.

would that mean i'll have to buy my dvd film collection all over again?

Esq, what about using a DVD RamDisk for back ups. They are up to 7gb arn't they?

Oh. oh.

I booted up my 3+ year old Dell last night and it started up but not before a beep and pause before the HDD engaged. AND it made a noisy spinning sound, like fan blades grazing against something which then modulated down to a low moan which then went silent.

It was late so I didn't open the baby up to look inside.

Actually, now I am afraid to. Best as I can tell, by ear, the center source for the blade / moan / was in the area where my two external drive bays and the internal bay for the HDD are located.

ULP.

ff - I've been considering that myself, and I doubt it. I do not believe that movies will end up being "blue laser" discs (at least not for years), mainly because of the proliferation of red laser DVD in the marketplace, and the cost of buying new equipment to create such disks. As most people have been buying red laser DVD, it would make no sense to force the average buyer to purchase another player, when such a changeover would require years to enter the mainstream and thus, years in which there would not be much return on investment. I think that blue laser DVDs will win over the desktop/small server market, because of the amount that you can fit onto one DVD, and the relatively low cost of the media. In any case, I wouldn't worry, as TEAC already have a DVD player that has both a blue and red laser, so our collections should be fine.

Final - DVD-RAM discs are great because they can act like hard disks, but 7GB? I;m pretty sure that they are 4.7GB, with 9.4GB for double-sided. At least they were when last I checked.

Indy - Come on! Have a looksy. Tell us what you see. I bet that it won't be as bad as your imagination makes it .

I knew there was a 7 in there some where. Old age again. Still, for data, music, ect., it would be the best idea for a back up as it holds more than most other media. There has been a push if you will, of external HDD desighned for backing up. USB2 I think, which isn't a bad idea, as it can be kept stored seperate from you computer in fire or other hazard conditions. Folks at wot=rk never learn this. Make data backups on old floppies and keep them right next to computer, which if it gets caught in a fire, you lose everything.

Indeed, off-site backups are the only prudent course of action. Still, some people never learn until it's too late .

The benefit of DVD-RAM is that it can be used around 100,000 times (good quality disks), compared to around 1,000 times (decent quality DVD-RW, etc). Still, external HDDs are great. My little 2.5" 40GB is still going strong. It has never had a problem.

So I removed the cover, checked all the connections, things seemed to be in place. I checked to see if any of the cables were touching any of the components, didn't really see anything. Took air blaster while I was at it and blew away dust bunnies.

Last night, crossed my fingers and booted up. No noise. No beep. Just a normal boot-up. Shut down, put the cover back on and powered up again. Still normal.

This cannot be right. There has got to be something going on in there. That grazing sound and low moan definitely sounded like a mechanical problem in there.

Something is starting to fail but I cannot figure out what. I don't think it is the HDD because the kind of scraping sounds that the PC made the night before should have meant a pretty massive HDD failure but it kept booting up and doing its thing quite happily all through the noise.

Don't think it is an optical drive problem. Zip drive ran fine last night as well, the floppy too.

I wonder if there is a cooling fan tucked into the drive bay assembly that I cannot see without disassembly.....

You may have had some trash aroung a fan blade.

Edited by - Finalday on 6/2/2004 10:07:41 AM

Hi guys, thanks for burying my computer well and I'm really touched ; not I'm wondering what I should really do with it. Should I just leave it in the corner of my room running as a server or should I just salvage from it and throw it away?

Also I've been looking into the new graphics cards, RAM and hard drives and I I'm wordering...
1. What is a RAID hard drive?
2. What is so special about duel channel RAM?
3. Have you seen the new Geforce 6800 and [url=http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/sapphire_ati_graphics_cards.html#agx_2d071_2dspRadeon X800? Which is better now?

I've got my [url=http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/Antec_Cases.htmlcase (Antec LANBoy), Processor, RAM make and hard drive make sorted now so it should be built together by the end of July.
Its not too expensive for everything actually and my computer wil all the bits in the case will cost £850

Argggg!!!!! It won't let me edit the post!