Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Help! My Photos Have Been RAIDed

A friend of mine is sad about recently losing a lot of photos off her digital camera. I feel really bad for her. It got me thinking about our own photo storage.

There are a lot of household tasks that I'm not very good at. Especially the menial ones. But there is one I am almost religious about. I frequently download our photos off the digital camera. I get nervous if I leave photos on there for very long.

But then I go beyond that. It's a little sad. I run my own manual RAID 1 array.

Leave it to me to have a filthy house but redundant copies of our photos on separate drives.

I've got big dreams. Someday, M says he'll set us up a RAID 5 array in his half of our closet next to the DSL router and (someday) house-wide Gigabit ethernet switch. A girl can dream can't she? (All that and I don't even have to sacrifice space in my half 2/3 of the closet for my combat boots, poodle cow skirt, and my disco ball? I knew M was a good catch!)

Even that's not ideal. I need to be better about uploading photos to an external site to protect against any real catastrophes. I used to be good about doing that, but it dropped off when kid #2 came along.

Dang it!!! Now that I've reminded myself about this, we won't have clean clothes for a month while I remedy the situation. This is all your fault...

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I think that this solution may be what you're looking for. It automatically redundancizes itself for you and if one hard drive dies the others still have your precious photos:
http://www.drobo.com/

Also:
http://www.eye.fi/
OMG ever since I got this I wonder how I ever lived without it. It's a memory card you put in your camera, and when it detects a wireless internet connection, will upload the photos to a designated place on your computer. AMAZING.

Capturing Joy with Kristen Duke said...

my blog is my external site if nothing else. I know you don't post that on yours though. Carbonite is a good one, but they only back up from your computer, not externals.

I back to my externals and also burn discs every few months. Too many people have lost things, gotta keep up with it. I do media better than house stuff, too:)

Leann said...

LOL! hahaha! And to think that I get excited to go home and get AWAY from the RAID world.