Recently, I’ve aquired the computer storage gear that I wanted in Jan. The stuff intended to keep me from having a massive loss of data; pictures, songs, movies, documents, etc.
At the time, one computer hard drive went down. An old one I had used 24/7 for 5 yr or so. When I went to rebuild it other hard drives seemed to be down too. After a lot of work and a major disheartening realization that all of my scanned photos, movies, songs, games, everything was probably lost I quit working on it and set the box aside. Something needed to happen and I didn’t want to face it at the time.
So, Drobo came out with a new box and put the old one on sale for %30 off. I got one of those and a separate dual NAS with 750 gig. Plus, I started buying movies from Amazon/TiVo and iTunes/Mac. These have to go somewhere. Deleting them is like throwing money away. Finally, the laptop hardrive has filled up many times. It’s only 80 gig and the external disk is nearly full.
This weekend I took stock. All of my CDs from the past 10 yr plus all the hard drives. Something on CD I rediscovered. Which is nicely surprising. Turns out that 8 out or 10 hard drives is unreadable. All the songs. Hours of scanning my photos. Old Bittorrents. My own ripped DVDs. My own ripped CDs. Nearly all of it is gone. At least a few hundred hours of work vanished. That really hurts.
The new rule is that something important must be stored in two places. Immediately. No waiting. The laptop drive, the external drive, DVD, CD, NAS, and another external drive, and Drobo are the options for now. There’s some space to do this for everything except DVDs. Even handbraked they take ~600 meg/hr. Drobo is the big help. It holds up to 4T and drives are interchangeable. Right now, it holds 1.6 T and isn’t even close to full.
Another suprise was discovering old games and old operating system disks. Making images of Win98SE, WinNT4, and Win2KSP4 is exceedingly easy with Mac. And I’ll try to use VMWare with the old images and install some old games. That would be interesting. Also, since I have decided not to build 2 WinXP boxes I can use my extra lic. to make a WinXP VM. This is something that costs $100 more to do on Vista.