External HDD for History
 

Hi all,

This is my senior year and seeing as I have a lot of pictures and videos of my team over the course of 4 years I'm looking for some way to archive all of the media.

My first thought is a external HDD, though my problem is finding one that seems to fit the job and is large enough. The main thing I am worried about is the hard drive crashing due to handling over the future years of manipulation by the members of the team. So it'd have to be something that can handle a bit of tossing and turning.

I suggested a drobo to my dad, but he thinks thats a bit of overkill.

Any suggestions?

Thanks
-Tanner

Re: External HDD for History
 

do you have an idea of how much storage space you're using? I haven't been around long enough to have an idea of what 4 years worth of media looks like, and going off of my stuff makes me think you'd only need around 50 gigs or so, but I'd rather be sure of what you need before I make any suggestions

also, how much will you need to carry it around? would you rather have a 3.5" hard drive or a 2.5" drive in there? (desktop drive vs. laptop drive)

Re: External HDD for History
 

I have no idea on size as all the files that would go on it are currently scattered around my MacBook, my desktop, and my dad's 4 TB HDD. I wouldn't expect it to be too much (25-50 GB), but having room for expansion would be necessary. You can never have too much room.

It probably won't be moving around too much. It most likely would stay at the school and be used/taken home when data on it is needed. I don't have a preference to disk size.

-Tanner

Re: External HDD for History
 

Why not use a portable USB drive like a Western Digital Passport?

Re: External HDD for History
 

I agree with your dad that a drobo is overkill. It's a great device, but if you only have 50GB of data, you'd be wasting space. I would suggest a simpler RAID system if you're worried about handling over the years. My Book Mirror Edition or My Book Studio Edition II. Your choice should be based on if you use Macs or PCs and what your budget is. I tend to lean toward Western Digital, but other brands are good, too.

Re: External HDD for History
 

Instead of having the drive be portable why not set up a sever that you can log in to and pull files from it no matter where you are.... that is as long as you have internet. :)

Re: External HDD for History
 

dropbox has some plans for 50 and 100 gigs if you're willing to pay a monthly subscription ($10-20 per month)

or, if you or someone else happens to have an extra drive laying around somewhere you could always try one of these hard drive enclosures. they're pretty cheap without the drive

Re: External HDD for History
 

A RAID system sounds nice though I haven't had too much experience with a external HDD RAID system. The My Book's seem nice, though just a bit overkill (1 TB?).

I use a Mac, but seeing as this is for the future member of my club, it should probably be able to be used on both Windows and Mac.

I thought about putting it online too, but that really wouldn't be easy to browse or search easily. Especially with large picture and HD video.

I think my dad actually has one of those, though the RAID idea sounds pretty neat.

I'll have to do some research on external HDD with RAID.

Thanks
-Tanner

Re: External HDD for History
 

Make sure you have at least two copies in seperate physical locations. If you are going to be carring this around you can't trust it, even if it has RAID. Acctually my guess would be RAID boxes would be more prone to failure when being moved due the increased complexity and if the drive would die due to impact or abuse chances are both would be damaged, but I don't have the evidence to prove it.

My suggestion is:

1. Get two cheap 2.5'' portable USB drives.
2. Label them A and B. Copy all of your data to drive A.
3. Copy everything from drive A to drive B, and place drive B somewhere safe (safe, safety deposit, someone elses house, just make sure they aren't in the same place).
4. Once you make made a significant number of changes (end of season, after event, etc.), copy all of the change from drive A to drive B, and then put A in the safe place and use B to make changes.
5. Keep repeating step 4, swaping drives each time to even the wear.

EDIT: You could give up on the second drive, and use online backup/storage as you duplicate copy. Either way you MUST have a second copy or you WILL loose data.

Re: External HDD for History
 

Dropbox doesn't JUST store it online, it copies the file(s) to the computers that are linked to linked to an account with access to the dropbox share. And since the files are stored locally and simply synced with the server, searching through files is actually very fast and pretty easy.

-Eric

Re: External HDD for History
 

It also replicates deletions, even accidential ones. That means that if you don't detect your mistake in a timely manner the data could be perminantly lost on all devices. This is easier to have happen than it sounds. I had this issue, but I didn't notice the missing data for over a month. Luckly I had nightly local backups of the machine I could restore the data from.

It is always best practice to keep at least two copies of the data, in different locations, and on different media (online, hdd, optical media, tape, etc.).

Re: External HDD for History
 

yes it does... but the website portion of it also keeps a record of file activity as well as shadow copies stored for every file in your dropbox(including deletions)... all I can say about your problem is that it's your own fault for not noticing for over a month, but I know dropbox will allow you to recover accidentally deleted files for at least a reasonable period of time

I do agree with you that best practice would be to keep multiple copies, but that can also be achieved by a small script, an extra hard drive, and a scheduled task(or cron if you're running linux).

-Eric

Re: External HDD for History
 

This year we spent $50 for 200 GB for Picasa and mandate that all our students upload pictures regularly. For this season alone, we will have over 15,000 pictures and videos. We've also begun moving what files we have into Picasa from previous years and have a library of about 30,000 to choose from. It's turned out to be quite simple and hopefully pretty safe. There may be some reduction in quality, but even at the largest upload size, you're supposed to be able to upload over 100,000 high quality images with 200 GB. No need to worry about and HDD failures... For longer videos, however, we just bought an external drive (but will still upload stuff to YouTube).

Re: External HDD for History
 

I've never used Picasa, but how well does it handle all the pictures? Load times good? Is organization good?

I've got a personal dropbox and it seems to handle lots of files quite fine (though the highest amount of files I've used in a folder is like 20). It'd be the exact same structure if the files were on a HDD which can be good/bad. Good as it is consistent, though bad cause it's not too detailed. Though if you start to download the files on your computer via the dropbox app, may you have a large HDD or yank the ethernet cable from your computer.

The only problem I would have with a cloud service is that it would involve resizing most of the pictures and uploading them. It'd take a while, thats for sure (especially on 4-5 years of photos, mostly due to my effort), but it'd be more organized than a plain ole' HDD depending on the service.

Still not sure what I'd like to use. HDD is definitely the easiest. What I use really depends on what all of it will be used for. I don't know if our team would use it enough to have a online service, though that'd be nice. Lots to think about...

-Tanner

Re: External HDD for History
 

Much like EHaskins wrote, but different: Get 2 drives, copy everything onto both. Team gets one, you keep the other, on a shelf. When other drive crashes, copy your drive onto yet another. Repeat as necessary.

This can also be done year after year - fill each drive, copy it, then put one on a shelf. Repeat forever.

Just be sure to pick a technology that will be supported in the future (such as USB or SATA), or maintain a machine just for that purpose (Consider 8-inch floppy disks; good luck finding a drive if you don't have one already)

Re: External HDD for History
 

SSD's could be in the horizon if you're willing to spend the money for them- they have much lower failure rates than mechanical HD's, but suffer from higher prices and lower storage capacities.