Winter or Spring?

A blustery, rain-snow mix today while I continue to recover data from my hard drive crash a couple weeks ago. I ended up taking the drive to a specialist because nothing I could do seemed to work. I had to pay for it, but it was worth it for a drive I had mostly backed up, but hadn't completed the process yet. 137GB of image files, total. I've been backing everything up to DVD as well as evaluating my back-up procedure. In the past 2 years, I've had 3 hard drive failures, one a total loss. The growth in the amount of digital image data we all produce, plus the increasing size of hard drives makes a hard drive crash quite significant.

Not everyone can set up a RAID server, and online storage is either prohibitively expensive or very time consuming to apply. An online service I've looked at is www.carbonite.comwww.carbonite.com which offers unlimited storage capacity for $50/year. But, the initial process to upload can take weeks of continuous upload (at a set maximum upload per day) for someone like me that has about a terabyte of image data. Downloads for recovery are also limited by the amount recoverable (download amount) per day.

Even with a RAID server setup, a separate, hard drive and DVD backup (at least 2 backup sources - removable hard drive/DVD, preferrably 3, with at least one offsite storage area) will help ensure your digital data is safe.

This is much more work than with film and the worst part of digital photography, I think.