|
|
|
|
Data Back-up: Woe to those who don’t! Programs that run in the background and automatically log changes to your computer are great, and not so great, at the same time. They offer limited protection but can also really degrade your systems performance. You want your files protected and you also want your system running at peak performance. So, what’s the concerned person to do? Back-Up! There are many options for backing up your work but the safest route is redundancy. Hard drives can fail, data can become corrupt, optical disks get damaged and some still question their longevity. The safest route is a combination of both. Certainly there is an investment of time on your part but that investment is negligible when compared to the damage and pain of lost work, regardless of whether that work was personal or for financial gain. Hard drive options Backing up your data to a hard drive is a fairly quick and
painless process. All you need to do
is install an additional hard drive in an open bay in your computer.
If you’re nervous about poking around inside of your computer then ask
a friend or family member for help. Most
people know someone who is “technology comfortable” and can perform the
quick installation for them. Create
a folder on that drive called “Image Backup”.
Inside of that folder you’ll create more folders, each labeled
appropriately for its contents. Staying
organized with accurate folder naming can make finding specific images easy.
We’ll deal with organization in
more depth in a future article on digital asset management (DAM).
The next level of hard drive back-up involves RAID. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. There are several types of RAID with RAID 0 and RAID 1 being the most common for consumers. Both of these types of RAID involve multiple hard drives installed in your computer and connected via a RAID card, which is a controller card made for handling the RAID array. With RAID you always want to use multiple drives of the same size, otherwise the array will be created using the size of the smaller drive and you will lose any additional space on the larger drive. With RAID 0 the computer sees both drives as one larger drive and the data is striped (or split) and written to both drives. This type of RAID results in increased performance of your machine but is not recommended when critical data is being backed up. Because of the way RAID 0 works (half the data is written to one drive with the other half being written to the second drive), if one drive were to fail you would lose all of your data and without paying a lot of money to specialized data recovery experts (with no guarantee of success) it would be gone – forever. This type of RAID is widely used by those doing video editing. Raid 1 involves two hard drives installed in your machine, with your computer basically only “seeing” one drive with the capacity of only one of the drives. The capacity is only equivalent to one of the drives because in RAID 1 the second drive is used as a “mirror” of the first drive. What ever data is written to the first drive is automatically written to the second drive. This gives you some sense of security, since if one of the drives in the array failed, your data would still be safe on the second drive. The weakness to RAID 1 is that it involves a performance hit on your machine. Exactly the opposite of RAID 0. Another option, and the best RAID option, would be RAID 0+1. This configuration gives you the best of both worlds. However, most off-the-shelf PC’s found at big box retail stores don’t have the expansion slots or expansion bays to support RAID 0+1. Hard drives don’t have to be inside of your computer – there are also external solutions. These solutions plug into your computer via either USB or Firewire (1394) and some will even plug directly into your home network (using a CAT5 network cable) through a network hub or switch. These external drives offer the added feature of portability and can easily be moved from computer to computer and taken out into the field and plugged into a laptop. Networked hard drives such as Netgear’s Storage Central (SC101) SAN (Storage Area Network) can secure your data using encryption, password protection and “mirroring” (RAID 1). Optical Drive
Options Optical disks (CD-ROM and DVD-ROM) are also good solutions for making backups of your image files. You need to have either a CD or DVD re-writable drive in your computer. CD’s hold 700 megabytes of data while single layer DVD’s (DVD-5) will hold 4.2 gigabytes of data. One gigabyte equals one thousand megabytes. Dual layer DVD’s are available as well and hold 8.5 gigabytes of data but you’ll need a dual layer capable re-writable drive in order to take advantage of these disks. Optical disks take up very little room and even images stored on these disks (off-line) can be organized using digital asset management software. The DAM software will keep thumbnail images on your computer of the images stored on your optical disks and when needed can tell you which disk the image you’re looking for is on, making retrieval simple. Both CD and DVD media are available as write once and re-writable. Write once media includes CD-R, DVD-R, DVD+R and DVD+R DL (dual or double layer). Re-writable media includes CD-RW, DVD-RW, DVD+RW and DVD-RAM. Write once media is cheaper and can not be written to more than once. Write once media is the best route for archiving since you’re not backing up images that you don’t intent to keep. Re-writable media is good for works in progress, which is work that you may be replacing with updated versions before reaching a final version. There are three different types of re-writable DVD media. The differences between DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW are insignificant so don’t be misled by any of the old media hype regarding the “format wars”. The difference between DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW only really matters when the disks target usage will be in a set-top DVD player such as those found as part of your home entertainment system, and even then the difference is small, with –R having the slight edge over +R (both formats deliver compatibility in the high 90’s (97%+). The compatibility issue with set-top players is greater for re-writable DVD’s with DVD-RW having approximately 80% compatibility and DVD+RW having about 79%. None of the home-made DVD formats have 100% compatibility with set-top players. In order to have 100% compatibility the DVD’s would have to be pressed at a replication facility from glass masters. DVD-RAM is the best DVD re-writable format for data back-up and storage; unfortunately the drives and media are not as commonplace as the other formats. Because the other formats are regularly used for making home videos you can walk into just about any “technology” brick and mortar retailer and buy the drives and media. There are fewer options when it comes to buying DVD-RAM drives and media. This is unfortunate since DVD-RAM is a much better solution for backing up your data. DVD-RW and DVD+RW can each be re-written to 1000 times while DVD-RAM disks can be re-written to 100,000 times. DVD-RAM disks, once formatted, are as simple to use as a hard drive – simply copy and paste or drag and drop your files as you would to a hard drive and DVD-RAM disks come as both an exposed disk or with a hard plastic “jacket” which protects the disk. With the kind of DVD-RAM disks that come in a protective “jacket”, the entire disk, “jacket” and all, is placed in the optical drive. Redundancy It’s a good idea to make multiple copies of your backups, especially for very important images and files. One set of back-ups can be made on a hard drive which offers faster access times than optical disk drives and another set of back-ups can be made on optical disks. Back-ups on quality DVD media can potentially last anywhere from 100 to 250 years and take up very little room. Because optical disks don’t require a lot of storage space they’re also easier to store off-site, either in a bank safe deposit box or at the home of a friend or family member. Better safe than
sorry As much as we’d like to believe differently, computer hard drives and optical disks have limited life spans. Both hard drive and optical disk back-up solutions have pro’s and con’s, so why not take advantage of both and get the best of both worlds. Your data and image library is important to you and could be devastating to lose. Back-up your data while you can because drive failure isn’t a question of if, but one of when. You’ll be glad you did. A future part two of Data Back-up will cover software solutions for backing up your data as well as a “how-to” for installing and setting up internal hard drives (single drives and RAID arrays) and optical drives. Networking will follow Data Back-up and will cover installing and setting up a home network for both back-up and file sharing purposes and networking your printers. David Singer, MNEC |