Share your craft projects
Make new craft buddies
Ask craft questions
Blog your craft journey
Best option for protection from failed disks is a RAID arrangement (redundant array of independent disks).
Most NAS systems have this as a common option. The data is written to several disks and can tell you when anything has become corrupt.
Unix/Linux fans have lots of nice stuff like "rsync" that have been around for decades and now are even GUIified to make management simple. Basically create an archive, then only periodically save the stuff that has changed. A restore then will assemble the original with the assorted changes based on whatever date you choose.
Best protection is having a separate backup off site.
Disk drives are good, but a general rule (very conservative) is a life expectancy of 5 years. Tape on the other hand is usually rated at 50 years for the current generations. I spent a number of years (several decades ago) dealing with archiving of several peta-bytes of data onto DAT drives (8mm, then 4mm) and always had trouble with the drives themselves so I'm leery of the 50 year claims.
Most NAS systems have this as a common option. The data is written to several disks and can tell you when anything has become corrupt.
Unix/Linux fans have lots of nice stuff like "rsync" that have been around for decades and now are even GUIified to make management simple. Basically create an archive, then only periodically save the stuff that has changed. A restore then will assemble the original with the assorted changes based on whatever date you choose.
Best protection is having a separate backup off site.
Disk drives are good, but a general rule (very conservative) is a life expectancy of 5 years. Tape on the other hand is usually rated at 50 years for the current generations. I spent a number of years (several decades ago) dealing with archiving of several peta-bytes of data onto DAT drives (8mm, then 4mm) and always had trouble with the drives themselves so I'm leery of the 50 year claims.
