Photography & Stuff

Lately I have been thinking a LOT about safeguarding my data. I like many Americans probably are keeping more and more important data digitally. I have to think it is natural to have an inherent mistrust for the longevity of digital data. Which means that I have to start seriously considering measures to safeguard my information. I currently have 4 Western Digital RE2 500GB drives in a 0+1 raid in my Mac Pro. I chose the RE2 because of it’s purported enterprise level design standards. 0+1 Protects me against drive failure but not against accidental data loss or overwriting, for that you need a redundant storage system that indexes files at certain points in time.

For instance at my work we have Veritas backing up versions of files at 12 AM and PM every day on a 4 week rotation which means you can roll back a file or folder to any 12 hour interval in the last 24 days! This is an awesome solution but really that much redundancy (potenntially up to 48 versions of a file) is only practical for a work enviroment where most files are Word and Excel files. Most home users will want to back up larger media files which do not change much over time.

So I looked at a number of options:

Resync, Raid 5, Time Machine, and finally ZFS. Unfortunately for me apple decided to disable raid 5 on the Mac Pro even though it is supported on the motherboard! Instead they want you to buy a $1K Raid Card, Forget about that! For a long time I considered some raid 5 implementation to be my best bet.   In the next part of this article I will talk about the different variations of raid 5 solutions I looked at:)

So it has been a long time since I have written a blog.  That’s OK because I think I could count my readership on one hand.  I have been taking a lot of pictures lately of Hopewell Valley Central Highschool’s Boys Lacrosse team.  Tyler is the JV/(part time Varsity) goalie. Check the Pictures out at this Link:

http://www.jdlphotovideo.com/Gallery/Photography%20Gallery/Events/Sports/Hopewell%20Valley%20Lacrosse%202008/index.html

or Just go to www.jdlphotovideo.com and click on the link on the front page (although it may not be there much longer). Next year when Tyler is the starting Varsity goalie you can expect to see pictures of at least every single home game!

Stay tuned for my next entry about sfegaurding your pictures!