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1. Setup your PC for multiple users, with permissions on folders and also make folders hidden both on your local hdd and portable backup storage.

2. Months down the track PC becomes unstable and you decide to reinstall, moving all files onto backup storage.

3. Reboot and reinstall.

4. Leave the user with default settings.

5. Explore backup drive only to realise that there is no photos on the backup drive.

6. Proceed to panic as you realise that all of your photos from the past 1.5-2years have perished.

7. Explain to your friend your problem and ask for any good data recovery programs, whilst planning to seriously damage some furniture.

8. While he searches, you think to yourself why have the photos suddenly mysteriously disappear. Only to remember that you made the folder hidden.

9. Slap yourself on the forehead

10. Explain to your friend that you've been a dick

THanks for sharing Darryl. Was it therapeutic.

Very!

It might be worth opening one of my bottles of Lindemanns tonight

my first digital pics got taken back in 97, when one of sata drives had a hiccup last year and i thought i had lost the lot i cried.
took me a few hours to recover the drive, but the first thing i did was a backup to optical then a complete copy to a another drive.

scariest few hours in my life i think.

Obzelite, it really makes me consider getting another one of these Nexstar3 cases with a 300mb drive in it. I really need multiple mirrored locations.

I recently installed an Adaptec 1210SA SATA RAID Card in my clone PC and have attached two x Seagate 200Gb SATA's to it in a mirror set just for this reason. And then every 3 months take a DVD burning of my photos directory. Hopefully this is enough.

I get a bit paranoid about losing data.
I have mine on a server running raid 5, the data gets replcated to 2 other machines also, one of which with raid 5 also. I have 2 dvd backups also and on 2 different brands of media just in case.

overkill perhaps, but is more a case of because I can!!

steve

kipper wrote:Obzelite, it really makes me consider getting another one of these Nexstar3 cases with a 300mb drive in it. I really need multiple mirrored locations.

i have one with a 250 in it. thats my hard drive back backup, plus an optical one i do every so often.
the nexstar only gets turned on to backup the photos so hard drive life should not be a problem.
i think its the best of the bunch, but i'm looking for a simple nat one, vantex do a networkable nexstar but its not nat and needs software installed to be visable.

kipper wrote:it really makes me consider getting another one of these Nexstar3 cases with a 300mb drive in it. I really need multiple mirrored locations.

Hear, hear!
I screwed up with a drive failure combined with a filesystem/partition corruption several months ago and lost almost 4 months of photos! :cry:
Except for the thumbnails in my iView catalog (but that just means I can see what I've lost... ). Darryl, be thankful you got your files back!
I've added another level of backups since then BTW.

obzelite wrote:i have one with a 250 in it. thats my hard drive back backup, plus an optical one i do every so often.
the nexstar only gets turned on to backup the photos so hard drive life should not be a problem.
i think its the best of the bunch, but i'm looking for a simple nat one, vantex do a networkable nexstar but its not nat and needs software installed to be visable.

The Nexstar3/Welland enclosures aren't bad, but really they're just another Prolific PL3507-based controller box (at least the combo ones I have) so electrically they're not a lot different from others. The housing and aesthetics of the box are quite nice, although you may want to cover up most of that bright blue LED if it's going to disrupt the colour-accuracy of your monitor...

When you say "nat" (Network Address Translation) do you instead mean NAS (Network-attached Storage)? A NAS box does provide you with a different option for attachment to your machine (especially if you have multiple computers accessing the files) but in my own setup I have the primary drives attached via Firewire for maximum speed.
The sets of off-line disks are attached via USB only for regular backups, and then it's disconnected. One of the advantages of off-line storage is that it's somewhat immune to operator error (RAID won't protect you from accidentally overwriting a file!) and to things like lightning strikes (a good UPS can help, but they're not perfect). For me there wasn't an advantage in paying the premium for on-disk network controller for something that is only connected once a week or once a month.
I've gone so far as to have small plastic crates containing a complete set of backup drives, with power supplies and USB hub. It makes it easy to take off the shelf (or drive from my off-site location), plug in, backup (or restore if I've had a problem), disconnect it, and take it back to its normal location. Having a UTP cable coming out of the box instead of USB could be cute, but not worthwhile for me.
Obviously YMMV!

yep, nas is was meant to be.

Actually found a cheapish one last night. just need to look for some reviews for it.

Darryl, I experience major brain explosions several times a year. It makes me feel better knowing that other people do too.

Having too much security can lock yourself in the trouble while bringing in the big ones...