Possibly OT... Hard Disk question

Actaully, this is really good value for money: www.iomega-europe.com/eu/products.aspx?p...er_500GB_USBEthernet

Technically some what expensive to start with but a great thing to have on your home network.

I think I'll stick with my 7 DVDs, I only back up 25gigs or so.
A cheap and chearfull solution. I just do not trust hard-drives.
I've never lost more then one at a time, so if I were to use raid it would be raid 5 with SATA drives, if you loose more then 1 drive be it raid 1 or 5 , you're sunk either way.

One more point Dave,
I also have a HP vectra from 2001, its a 1gig machine, I recently got a 2.8gig dell machine that leave the HP in the dust, I wouldn't bother spending money on the HP, the dells are going quite cheaply and you'll end up with a machine that'll be much faster then the HP will ever be.

I have lost entire systems that were on RAID, its a technology not a guarantee. Have a backup strategy - that's the key.

Its robust for what it is. It just isnt a backup system, its there to be a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. To allow you to put a set of disks together to be reasonably fault tolerant. The more disks you have the better it is.

I've only had one major disk failure in work this year. The system had two stripes of disks 5 each (RAID 2) mirrored off each other (RAID 1). It also had two hot spare drives ready to swap in in case of a failure. One morning I came in to an email from the system telling me that it had a broken disk but had reconfigured itself and told me what I had to replace. Now while it was fixing itself a disk could have broken on the other side of the mirror, and I'd have got a mail telling me to get the backup tapes!

What RAID gives you is some redundancy not backups. That system gets a full backup to tape at the weekend, and an incremental backup every night. One copy of the tapes are kept onsite and the other is sent to a offsite company who store the tapes 20 miles away. If you _really_ want to be sure you dont loose data then thats the kind of thing you need to do.

For lots of home data, some RAID device combined with DVD backup of important files is probably the most economical. And newer DVD drives can write to double sided disks which is helpful.

The network is the computer though In a year or two we'll see ISP's offering cheaper and cheaper hosting, so it will start to make sense to use an ISP as a storage device. Sun employees in the USA dont even use computers at home anymore, they just get $150 sunrays with no disk etc. and use CPU and disk resources on the server, where redundancy can be managed properly.

I have a Western 160GB Ext HD on order since Fri. €111.

I decided to get Ext. HD, as I do need it to be portable.

That's all very fine as long as it keeps going though :roll:
A friend with a Dr. in this area informs me that with any HD, you can start asking Q's re. reliability >1yr.

And this one has Picassa already loaded on it. But I'll have transfer over the files from 'My Pics' on XP, as the original Picassa on any PC is, of course, only a 'virtual' folder. Any changes I make on this do not alter the 'real' file. Now I can't say I'm fully up to speed with all of Picassa's options.
I suppose Picassa doesn't come into the equation when we're talking astro pics :

Anyway, DVD storage would be the other option. I'll back up that way too, as Dave Lillis does. This could be say, twice a year. the HD will be immediate with the click of the mouse. I too would have smaller storage requirements. But Ext. HD is sooo handy for using on another PC, or when the upgrade comes along.

I too have a lot to catch up on re. this area. :oops: