Total Serious Happy Thread

[alphabassettgrrl]

GD- Flickr or Picasa might be another option for photo storage. Alternately, terabyte hard drives at Fry's are cheap.

[Ghoulish Delight]

Originally Posted by alphabassettgrrl

GD- Flickr or Picasa might be another option for photo storage. Alternately, terabyte hard drives at Fry's are cheap.

I have 3TB of storage at home. I had 2 duplicates of my photos directories, and a daily backup stored on a RAID 5 array (3 drives grouped such that if any one drive dies, all data is still in tact).

After the CPU fan broke off its bracket, the computer did several emergency shutdowns due to overheating. I got the fan repaired only to discover that somewhere along the line a system file must have been corrupted and the OS would crash within 5 minutes of booting. Eventually I had to reinstall the OS. In doing so, I deleted the partitions with the 2 redundant copies of the directory - secure knowing that I had the backup protected on the RAID 5 array.

Except that at some point during the reinstall process, the system, for reasons that make absolutely zero sense to me, decided my RAID 5 array no longer existed. Just 3 disks sitting there with no way to access the data.

Fortunately, even though I "formatted" the partitions with the data on them, it was a quick format (meaning it just deleted the small amount of information that tells the computer where on the disk all the files are, rather than deleting any data) and I never actually wrote anything to the disk after that, so the data was still there, I just needed some software that could scan the disk and recover it. But yeah, that was enough for me to no longer trust ANY entirely local backup strategy. Only a perfect sh*tstorm of fail could have wiped my data out...and it damn near happened. I'm far too attached to my photos to let that happen again.

Flcikr carries the same problem as CD/DVD, it requires actually remembering to upload stuff. Online backup services happen automatically, no extra work required. Just what I need. And at $50/yr, worth it to me.