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[meppi]

Well, I just had another catastrophic external HDD crash so that's not much fun. :-/
Second time in a year actually.
So if I can give anyone reading this some good advice: stay far away from Western Digital drives. They are terrible.

Lost quite a bit of data as it was a 3TB one this time.
Worst part is that I don't actually know what I lost. I was working on doing double backups to other drives to make sure when something like this happened, I would still have my data.
Guess that boat has sailed.
Luckily I still have 2 backups of all the magazine stuff on different ones so the work in progress shouldn't be interrupted too badly.
I did just waste a whole day trying to see if I could fix it though, instead of finishing up the next magazine as I was planning to.

I just hope I didn't lose my Mysterious Universe collection as well as my RetroForceGo one... damn.

Already ordered 3 new 1TB USB3 replacement drives. The smaller ones that don't need a power cord this time.
Went for Samsung ones as I've had a couple of small ones from them and they have been holding up perfectly for a number of years now. Hope I have a bit more luck this time.
Sucks about the money that's wasted though.

[KiwiArcader]

Seriously, why don't just grab a 2-bay NAS and populate it with 2 x 3TB HDD's using RAID so that you are covered if one HDD fails? Or get a 4-bay NAS and RAID 5 it so you get 9TB Storage and 3TB redundancy and if one HDD fails just slot a new one in and wait for it to rebuild.

I have a 2-bay NAS with 2 x 1TB HDD's just for storing my magazines on. If it gets too small I will just move the content off and swap the HDD's out for 2TB drives and transfer it back on again and I'm good for another year or two. I did this after having that HDD fail when I was working on scanning for Retromags and wasn't going through that again and it's stood up well. Mind you I have WD drives and haven't had an issue with them.

If I wasn't losing my job this week I would have been purchasing a 4-bay Netgear NAS in preference to running my media server 24/7 and retiring my 2-bay NAS at the same time.

[meppi]

As to answer the question. Simply because I had no idea what all that even meant before I looked it up. ;P

Seems a bit overcomplicated for something as simple as just wanting a secure backup.
If it was able to do this wirelessly it would be quite interesting, but still.

In the end I lost everything from Mysterious Universe as I feared, but luckily I'm a veteran subscriber, so I'm able to redownload all the past shows until they redo their system in a few months or so.
So I was able to download 40+GB of stuff last night. (My ISP must really love me. )

I lost a couple of magazine originals, but luckily I have a Time Capsule from which I was able to restore all the lost stuff.

Most of what is lost seems to be wrestling related. A huge amount of Japanese stuff as well as lots of WCW Nitros from back in the day... Really sucks that one.

[KiwiArcader]

I guess it boils down to how much you don't want to lose, or conversely, are prepared to lose in the event of a disk failure.

[meppi]

Not really.
I just don't see having a bulky box tethered to my laptop at all times as a good solution.
So I'd rather have a couple of small, 1TB portable HDDs that don't need a power source and that I can take anywhere, while having a main backup on a 3TB stationary HDD.

I'm also thinking of getting a bluray burner to have the most important stuff on a different medium entirely. One that isn't as prone to corruption as a HDD which has a pretty high failure rate.
Of course discs fail as well over time, but high quality ones, which are a bit more expensive will easily outlive any HDD.

[KiwiArcader]

Don't believe everything you read about optical media being long life and therefore perfect long term storage. I purchased Kodak Gold Disc CD-R's touted as having 100 year archival life and they failed to read after 2 years almost as much as cheaper media.

You appear to chose portability predominantly over security as relying on one 3TB as a backup is no backup at all as you have found out. And I have been in that basket too. Having portable HDD's to carry stuff around is fine (forgetting the worries about dropping the things for a minute) but in my mind having at least a 2-bay NAS with data duplicated on both drives is a much safer solution long term.

[meppi]

Oh, trust me, I don't believe such claims.
I'm going by the train of thoughts that a burned C&D or DVD will have a maximum lifespan of 20 years tops, and that's when they are stored in optimal condition.
After 10 years I'd be sure to make new copies of them just to be sure.

As for the HDDs, I'm not going to be using a single 3TB one again.
I was actually in the middle of transferring all my RetroforceGo episodes from one to the next along with everything else, to make sure I have an exac copy of it all on at least two separate drives.
Then the one failed right in the middle. :-/

So I'm going to be using the 3 1TB portable drives as "work drives", and will copy everything on them to a different 3TB one that will just be used as a backup and nothing else.
When I get the bluray burner, I'll be making another copy of all the important stuff so that I have 3 different copies of it all, one on a solid state medium.

[KiwiArcader]

I have all my magazines stored on the NAS which has 2 x 1TB HDD's. One mirrors the other so if 1 drive fails you slip a new drive in and you wait for it to rebuild. If both drives fail well ...

All my media is currently sitting on a Windows 8 PC using 'Storage Spaces' to aggregate 10TB across multiple HDD's. There is no redundancy on the server so if a drive fails I'll lose stuff but as it is mainly video I don't care too much about that happening.

I am getting tight for space on the NAS so at some point I will acquire a couple of 2TB WD Red drives (optimized for NAS) or 2TB Seagate's, copy the content off the NAS, swap the new drives in and move the content back on again. The main issue is the NAS isn't the fastest out there, hence looking at a new 4-bay. Well, today I find out whether I have a job so that purchase is on hold now pending the outcome ....

[meppi]

Yeah, I understand. especially now that I'm looking to buy a new home and sell this one once I find my dream house.
The place that I work at is doing okay, but things could be a lot better, so I certainly worry about losing my job once I've bought a new place. Could be very problematic....

In a bit of good news, my new scanner arrived today.
I just bought a new one a while ago, but as I found out, changing scanners can be a huge headache.
Luckily after doing quite a lot of testing, I found a combination of setting that I'm extremely happy about.
But when doing so much scanning work, these devices tend to get stressed a lot and break down, start to act up, or even the scanplate sight get get scratched. So to make sure I have the same scanning equipment for a very long time, I decided to order a spare one just in case anything happens to this one.
This way I don't have to worry about this model being out of stock in a year or 2 and finding out that the new models don't support certain things, or do things in a way that aren't ideal for what we use it for.

[meppi]

Hmm, I was ready to start editing issue 9 of Mean Machines as I completed the joining back together of nearly all of the pages when I realised that the issue had some serious damage that I never noticed before.

Seems like the rollers that carry the pages as they come of the press have to had been dirty when this particular specimen rolled off the production line.
Quite a lot of the pages have dark vertical stripes running throughout them which would take ages to clean up manually.
Nothing that's impossible, but we're talking about needing 3-4 hours of editing on perhaps as much as 40 pages, which is kinda ridiculous even for me. ;P

So I decided to thrash these scans and rescan the whole issue again, this time using another copy.
Luckily thanks to the past donations, I have several issues of many magazines just in case of something like this comes up.
This different version does have a couple of images cut from it, so I'll need to redo these from the other version, but that won't be any problems.

Will take a bit more time to get this one out since I have to start all over, but then again, I wouldn't be happy with the result if I went ahead with the current scans on my system.

[RedTop]

I'm really quite paranoid when it comes to loosing data after experiencing a harddrive crash before, hence I introduced a network-only model at home years ago, i.e. clients' harddrives only contain the OS and installed applications, all data is contained on network drives. I've now got a file server humming away 24/7 with two 4TB RAID 5 arrays in it (in need of expansion). On top of the RAID redundancy I make backups of the most important files from one RAID array to the other and vice versa, on top of which I make backups to a 3TB USB drive, on top of which I make off-site backups using Crashplan (great service, highly recommended).

Pretty sure that must have lowered the chances of loosing data.

The crashed harddrive was a Western Digital too btw. Have been running Samsung ever since, never lost a drive again.

[meppi]

Haha, that's quite the setup! 

Right now I have 4 1GB Samsung drives, all for different kinda things. I back all of that data up on two 2TB WD ones that I still have and take another 3TB one to back the most important stuff up once more.
I'm still thinking of buying a Bluray burner and a stack of discs to do one more backup on a different medium, but this month has been very expensive as it is, so I'll hold off a bit longer.