hard drive storage

[The Magnificent Goldberg]

MG! Now, you know better...you have to have a very, very long FireWire cable - a few kilometers in length!

The storage, MG, is after you've filled it.

You buy two HDs and you hook them up to your computer so that

everytime that you add something to one drive

it is automatically copied to the other one.

It's called "RAID 1" and is simpler than it sounds.

You can buy, for instance, two medium sized drives - let's say, 160 GB -

and begin filling one up while

the other is simultaneously creating a copy.

At any time that you feel that you've got enough stuff on it/them,

you take your second drive and put it somewhere else

in safe storage where it's not used.

I suppose that you could rent a bank box to keep it instead of at a friend's house.

A composer friend in Munich has just finished archiving his complete output

in glorious 96/24-bit hi-def - over 750 GB of his compositions -

and took the second drive over to a friend's house for safekeeping.

If his drive at home goes wicky-wacky, he knows that his work is safe on another

and he can always transfer from that one to a new drive if he ever needs to.

Remember, even if you are in the middle of your archiving and one drive goes down,

you still have another one with all of your stuff on it - the chances of both drives failing

on their own at the same time is incredibly unlikely.

You're increasing your reliability exponentially over a single disk.

Oh, I see. I assumed that you'd have two drives that you were in the process of filling up in different places. Thanks Rod.

OK, I am clear that I've got to do something like this before I hit the old folks home and they tell me I can't bring my CDs, LPs, K7s, 45s and 78s.

BTW - I had two hard drives go down simultaneously and irrecoverably, courtesy of my son-in-law (well, you know what sons-in-law are like )

MG