Ninja vs Penguin

Penguin September 16th, 2008

You know that hard drive you have your precious data backed up on? You know, the one that you just keep on your shelf so you can sleep well knowing that your data’s safe. Well, it may not be so safe.

Magnetic signals recorded on a hard disk are designed to be refreshed periodically. If your hard disks stay on, this happens automatically. However, if you store your projects to a removable hard drive, then store that hard drive on a shelf, unattached to a computer, those magnetic signals will fade over time… essentially, evaporating.

According to what I’ve been told, the life-span of a magnetic signal on a hard disk is between a year and a year and a half. The issue is complex, as you’ll see, but this is a MUCH shorter shelf-life than I was expecting.

- Larry Jordan

Life span of only about a year. That’s pretty scary. But that’s just an average. There have been reports where people have plugged in old drives and have them still work. But this is really dependent on how you store the drive.

So, the solution isn’t just to plug in the drive every year, that may not guarantee the drive is refreshed. You also want to copy the entire contents. This will ensure that every bit is read and refreshed.

This just goes to show, when it comes to backups, you need multiple solutions on different media.

-Penguin

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• Comparison of Optical, Magnetic, and Paper Media (2)
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Tags: Archiving, Backup, Hard Drives

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Penguin May 14th, 2008

This is by no means a comprehensive guide to organizing digital pictures, it’s just what I do.

I have a Perl script that copies all the pictures from my compact flash to my HDD. Why a Perl script? Because my Canon XT splits up the pictures into different folders in sets of 100. When you have a 4 GB CF card, that’s a lot of folders to look through. The script looks in each folder and each file and sorts them by date. It creates a folder on the HDD for each day in the format YYYYMMDD.

Once the card is dumped to my HDD, I go through and rotate all the pictures by opening the folder in thumbnail view. This gives me a good idea of what I shot on that day and if they need to be subcategorized. Example: If a shot a park, then my friend dancing, then a waterfall, each of those would get their own folders. These folders are prefixed by the date and then a letter and then the subject of the pictures.

Over the years, I’ve taken about 50 GB worth of pictures. Archiving them becomes an issue. How do I retrieve the pictures from the 50 or so CDs (now I’ve moved to DVDs)? I physically metatagged each CD with the date and the folder structure. I then put this same information into a spread sheet and numbered each disc, essentially creating an index.

Why not use software? Because most software creates its own database of the pictures. I’m also not looking to tag each individual picture. This solution also makes backing up things a lot easier because it’s application independent.

You can download my simple script. ***Note: You have to have Perl installed on your machine.
Download the Perl script

-Penguin

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Tags: Archiving, Downloads, Free, Guides, Metadata, Organizing, Perl, Photography

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Penguin May 9th, 2008

This past week, I’ve been helping Ninja clean her mess called a room. Earlier in the week, I had been cleaning my own room and in both instances, I came across the same problem: What to do with old media?

The following is a list of media that I encountered:

• Optical (DVDs, CDs)
• Magnetic (3.5 inch, 5.25 inch, Zip, VHS)
• Paper (books, loose, photographs)

The main issue is density. Both in terms of physical space that the object takes up and the amount of data that can be stored on the medium. A secondary issue is obsolescence. The majority of these can no longer be read by modern hardware (floppies, Zip, VHS).

Optical Media
With bittorrent and about 1.5 TB of HDD, I find very little reason to maintain a collection of DVDs or CDs anymore. Of course, I have spindles of both containing various backups of video, images, mp3s, and software. But what to do with purchased optical media? It’s been at least 4 years since I’ve bought or even listened to a music CD. At the same time, I don’t feel like I should just toss it. I already have all but a few of the CDs in mp3.

Magnetic Media
Old magnetic media are garbage. The only ones I hesitated on throwing out were Zip disks and only because there was a possibility that Ninja had some art on it. I also have about 40 games or other pieces of software that come on CD but can’t be run by Windows XP because they were designed for DOS or Win95. Even though the media itself is current, the software has become obsolete. Do I go through the trouble of finding hacks and emulators to run them considering I haven’t touched many of these games in over 8 years?

Paper
The worst is paper. Paper has low physical and data density. 1 8.5×11 sheet can contain a max of 4872 characters (Courier New, 12pt, 0 margin) or 4.9 KB, that’s a data density of 0.05 KB/in^2. Where as a CD can hold 700 MB, resulting in a data density of 45,000 KB/in^2. That’s the equivalent of 900,000 pages.

The main benefit of paper is that it is future proof. No matter what technology comes around, we will always have the necessary bioware to read the media.

Conclusion
So, now what? As much as I would like to throw out my optical media, I can’t bring myself to do it. It takes up relatively little space compared to the other storage mediums. I’ve tossed pretty much all the magnetic media. And most of the paper has gone in the trash as well. Books are a little harder to throw away. Some old manuals have gone in the bin, but many others need to find their way to shelves.

-Penguin

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Tags: Archiving, CD, Comparisons, Data, DVD, Floppy, Paper, Storage

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Penguin April 4th, 2008

source

Drobo is a “RAID” external storage solution. I put RAID in quotes because it really isn’t. It functions similarly to a RAID 1 setup, but the cool feature is that you don’t need to format the drives or even run identical capacity drives!

Ever since I started working with video, storage and archiving has been a huge concern/fear of mine. Love Angle took up a whopping 88 GB and 20 DVDs.

DVD is still probably the best longer term (5-10 years) solution, I still need an immediate solution for all my HD footage, especially as I work on multiple projects simultaneously.

The Drobo is a bit of an investment at $500 USD, and that’s without any drives. But it’s expandable with 4 bays, hot-swappable, and tells you when drives fail.

-Penguin

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Tags: Archiving, Backup, Hard Drives, Hardware, Storage

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Penguin March 26th, 2008

Little Frong in High Def compares various archival solutions:

LTO3 (Tape)
$0.08/GB
Pros: Cheap, long life-span
Cons: High setup ($2000), sequential read/write

HDD
$0.20/GB
Pros: Fast, no setup costs
Cons: Unreliable

DVD
$0.19/GB
Pros: No setup costs, easily expandable, versatile
Cons: Slow, takes up space, medium life-span (5-10 yrs)

Blu-Ray
$0.90/GB
Pros: High capacity, Can produce HD content, reliable, long life-span (50+ yrs)
Cons: $600 setup for drive, takes up space, slow

As it stands, for pure backup purposes, DVD is probably the most practical. As Blu-Ray comes down in price, and especially if you are doing a lot of HD, it may make sense to move to the new format, especially since HD-DVD is dead, there’s no more uncertainty in the format war.

Prices as of March 2008

-Penguin

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Tags: Archiving, Hardware, Storage

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