Re: [ARSCLIST] Audio storage on external hard drives

[Scott Phillips <scottp@xxxxxxxxx>]

It is a pity everyone must become IT managers.... But then everybody
already was, of a different type. There doesn't seem to be any way
around it. A pity digital formats are so unforgiving when they
deteriorate... And least analog is more recoverable when the media is
trashed.

-----Original Message-----
From: Association for Recorded Sound Discussion List
[mailto:ARSCLIST@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Richard L. Hess
Sent: Monday, February 21, 2005 7:26 PM
To: ARSCLIST@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ARSCLIST] Audio storage on external hard drives

At 06:12 PM 2/21/2005, Scott Phillips wrote:
>Richard,
>
>..are you using RAID disk technology for storage, and if so , what RAID

>level ? This certainly is a consideration....

Hi, Scott,

Welcome to ARSC List!

If I had more money, I would be using RAID, but the costs of doing that
right now are higher than the approach I've taken.

I use ViceVersa Pro to automatically sync the work folders that new
stuff goes in, and I use Ghost to grab a snapshot of the operating
environment on each of the PCs.

So, in essence, my system will be close to a RAID 1 (full mirroring),
but separated by two brick walls and 20 feet.

Ideally, each of the two stores would be RAID 5, but that is much more
expensive.

I'm using a LaCie Ethernet Disk as my basic NAS box and I am trying to
order a second without paying an arm and a leg penalty for being in
Canada.
They are 0.5TB native with two 250G drives in it. I have four Maxtor
250GB "One Touch" external drives that will be two on each in the final
setup.
Right now, all four are on one LaCie and are being mirrored in that
configuration.

The nice thing about the Ethernet Disk is the firewire port. I can add a
LaCie RAID array to it to replace the Maxtor drives at some point.
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10595

The Ethernet Disk itself is at
http://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?pid=10587

So, no, I'm not using RAID officially, just the concept of full
mirroring of one NAS store into the other.

It's possible to lose things, but not much will get lost. The sync is
done nightly. Some items are cloned the first time to the mirrored
store, but are not updated. Samplitude changes the date and time of some
of the files without actually changing the file. Since I edit in virtual
mode or make new files when I edit WAV files, I don't ever do
destructive editing on WAV files, the original version of each file name
is kept in the second mirror.
In this way, I'm guarding against corruption of the WAV file. I do the
same with Nikon RAW images. I might lose my parameter adjustment, but I
don't lose the raw capture. I also do that with JPEGs from the other
digital cameras, so if someone edits and crops the image, I back that up
in one place, but keep the original camera JPEG someplace else.

So for audio, the VIP files (the virtual projects) will be cloned and
I'm looking into keeping a complete daily history snapshot of these as
well.
These are the ones that hold all the edits and they are small.

It's all rather complex and rule based, but it needs to be. When one
person is dealing with the IT from the audio business, finance records,
email, 2 kids' homework, image files from five digital cameras operated
by four people, and soon a good slide scanner, the data just piles up. I
can't afford to manage it manually, all I can do is monitor the
automatic management. Oh, and the second LaCie won't have any public
shares. I'll be running ViceVersa Pro on it in "pull" mode and it will
be a "dark box" on the network other than my ability to remote desktop
into it behind my SPI hardware firewall. I'll either push stuff out of
it if needed or set up one share to drop files into, but I think no
share is better.

I've spent about fifty hours this week on the backup. Nice thing about
having the flu--everything else was too annoying.

Cheers,

Richard


Richard L. Hess                           email: richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Vignettes
Media                           web:   http://www.richardhess.com/tape/
Aurora, Ontario, Canada             (905) 713 6733     1-877-TAPE-FIX