It appears to be the dog days of summer, and I have time on my hands to attend to all those important maintenance tasks that don’t ever get their proper attention. That pile of disorganized CDs and DVDs of miscellaneous copies of whatnot—they’re in their place now (mostly the trash can). There’s a new space on the shelf, formerly occupied by my contact sheet notebooks, for the backup DVD binders. I cleared up space on the hard drives, and I’ve made new Iview catalogs of my scanned and master image directories.
Per Jeff Goldner’s advice from the Microsoft ProPhoto Summit (see the entry on him here), I plugged in and opened up files on each of the collected hard drives that store my digital archive. Hard drives that sit on a shelf die. You need to plug them in and spin them once in a while, akin to turning the bottles in a valuable wine collection. This is the tertiary set of redundant backups that I keep (one is the primary archive on my online hard drives, two is the DVD archive, three are these hard drives that live across the street). I’d plug in a hard drive, and open up a few files to see if there were any problems. There were none, until I came to the archive holding my files from May and June of last year. I could see the directories in Windows Explorer, and if I had only gone that far, I would not have known anything was wrong. But any file I tried to access came with error messages and file corruption warnings. I could not open up anything on the drive.
When I tried to disengage the drive, there were more "file corruption" messages. Something was deeply wrong. Of course it had to be one of the 250gb drives, not one of the old 40gb backups. But, I had a spare empty drive, and all the files intact on my server. I hooked it up and copied everything over.
Let this be a lesson to you. Are you backed up? In triplicate?
Do you copy from the CF card to your primary drive and then again from the CF card to your back-up? I found you could have file transfer problems from the CF card to the hard drive. If you copy directly from the CF card to different drives you can mitigate that problem.
Posted by: Bruce Nall | August 19, 2006 at 07:21 PM