[linux-audio-user] Reliable archival of recordings

[Kai Vehmanen]

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Ross Vandegrift wrote:

> around, I'm not sure if I wanna spring the $200 for a pair of 120G+
> drives.  But we all know I'll regret getting something smaller.
[...]
> 	Does anyone here have some other clever solutions to getting
> reliable archives of recordings?  My ardour sessions, even for demos

I'm just thinking of getting a new pair of 80GB drives (best 'GB per 
euro' ratio ;)). 80GB won't last forever, but not a huge problem if you 
have a usable archive/backup system. (*)

What I've done is to buy a USB-IDE rack (I have one A-Link model, works
pretty nicely, although sometimes freezes the kernel if in SMP mode :().  
This allows me to mount my old IDE drives (and there's a lot of them) as
backup drives, and thanks to USB I can do this without having to shutdown
the system. And even the oldest drives (2.5GB bigfoot still working) are 
bigger than CDs and DVDs.

As the drives are not physically connected while not used, data is safe 
from software/user errors, disk space is cheap (less than one euro/dollar
per GB). And much more practical to use than burnable CD/DVDs.

(*) For personal use I prefer to use manual-rsync mirroring 
    instead of RAID. Usually when I've lost data, the cause was
    software errors (me working on or testing kernel drivers) or
    a user error. RAID won't help in these cases, but semi-automatic
    rsync-mirroring most often will...

--
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