Digital BW, The Print

Your issue with Mirror data is sad buy it's what occasionally happens with a software back up system.. Windows has the gift of getting drive assigments screwed up occasionally ..their are just to many possible issues with a software back up system.. Windows back up actually works pretty well especially if you figure out a good back up scheme.. I have never been able to make it a full year without some sort of issue.. You need to monitor the stuff and if you don't you get what you get.. I struggled for a long time on what I should do.. I used to work at an engineering firm and also checked out what they do at banks and ended up doing a very small partial scale set up of what they do.. SO far it has worked  but nothing is flawless and I know that. We run both Mac and PC platforms here.... along with doing my own work were a service house as many here are. We have found that hardware raid systems seem to work the best.. You can get as involved in this as you want or your pocket book will allow. All of the hardware we use now it hot swap.. and on the weekends we mirror/ update the data to an added drive and that set of drives is kept off site.. We also put master files on flash drives monthly and their off site also.  I think what I feel is the advantage to this methind as I see it  is that if I have any issues with writing or mirroring data the hardware reacts to that issue and lets you know .. Even if tey computer is off.. AS long as teh rai unit is on it will react.. So you have to deal with it.. I also like that it is not subject to OS issues.. If the hardware side of it falters you can put the drives in another unit and move on..  The down side is that when you loose a drive while your still operatrional it like watching paint try rebuilding an array that contains 1.5 or 2 TB drives, but you can still keep working but the caution flag is up.. Nothing is perfect.. Everyone has differnet needs and different amounts of money they can throw at it. I guess the important thing is to do it and then follow up as needed to make sure that what have going is indeed doing the job.

jimbo
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Richard Smallfield 
  To: DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Wednesday, February 09, 2011 5:51 PM
  Subject: Re: [Digital BW] CD/DVD failure?


    
  I've had CD/DVD failures, too. But I've also had hard drive failures that have combined with the failure of the backup program and resulted in unrecoverable data loss.

  I use Mirror Folder for backing up (it's rather complex) and twice I've had unreadable data on the source disc - and then found that the mirror disc has also lost not just the corrupted data, but folders of tens of GBs of data, for no apparent reason. (It was set to backup any deleted files and keep the backups for two weeks but is now set to keep such files for three months, as I now know that I might not see an error within two weeks. And I'm no longer letting it delete unmatched files.) 

  So ... although hard drives are easier and cheaper, even with hard drives, one has to be very careful about the ramifications of the options chosen in the backup software, and have more than one backup copy. And check the program is working as intended, regularly - something it is easy to fail to find time to do.

  Any further suggestions would be appreciated from me, too.

  thanks,
  Richard

  Richard Smallfield Photography 
  http://richardsmallfield.com 



  

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