Last days little accident with the lost psd file got me into an evaluation of my backup routine. In general I don’t do backups to safeguard against my own stupidity. That is, If I look at a picture and press delete, it should be considered gone. Of course, the trash bin will cut me some slack, but if I change my mind after a few days, I cannot count on being able to get that file back. So my backup is against hard disk failure, break-ins, fire and all that stuff. Not that I intend to introduce a routine that would have saved my file, but small accidents like this always get me to think.
Well, back to my reevaluation. What I really want is a Raid configuration at home. I’m a sucker for redundancy. So I’m really thinking of getting the Western Digital My Book Pro II that Paul at Photo Musing set me on to. Right now I do one on site backup and one off site backup (bringing the data to my office), but the raid disk would make the extra on site backup unnecessary. Well, depending on how paranoid you are.
Kjell, I’m thinking along the same lines. The NAS box I’m considering is a BuffaloTech TeraStation which look pretty good at reasonable price. I’ll run it off a fast wireless network in a separate room.
I like your off-site storage solution, why can’t I think of simple solutions like that?
I haven’t seen the BugffaloTech box in any Norwegian Web stores yet. I think I will go for the FireWire connected box since I don’t have a 1Gb network at home. This disk will be the disk I’m using for photoshop and everything else, and there is a significant speed loss, even if you run 802.11n at 5GHz.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11#802.11n, the maximum theoretical throughput is 248Mbit/s, and typically it is 74. If you haven’t tried it, you should do that before you fork out a large amount of money. Or at least make sure the box you’re buying also can handle USB or Firewire in case the speed penalty through the network is not acceptable.
As for the off site backup. My employer forces me to show up at this darn office every single day, so I might as well get some benefits out of it, like storing a hard drive here