Cold storage for Cold january

kevsmith Jan 15, 2021

  1. kevsmith

    kevsmith TrainBoard Member

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    So time for my ritual task done after the New Year of backing everything up off my hard drives.. In the old days so, long as you kept your negatives and transparencies somewhere safe there was little chance of losing things totally unless you had some sort of natural disaster affect your house.

    But since we all went digital how vulnerable are we? Computer viruses, burglaries,corrupted drives, mistakenly wiping etc something all mean that all these still and video records could go overnight.

    So I back everyhing up onto cold drives. These are external hard drives that I copy everything on to. In my case we are looking at 33,000 photos including scans of all nags and trannies dating back to 1955 if you include all my late fathers railway photos and god knows how many hours of HD video plus scans of stuff out of magazines like drawings and photos for future projects. And all my MP3 music files so there is nearly 12TB of data in total as of this January, it takes days to back it all up. Also on there are also all the Excel files that list every picture and vido file.

    once done these HDDs are disconnected and put somewhere safe well away from my home office. Mine are kept outside in the loft space in the workshop, wrapped in bubble wrap and kept in a couple of locked old aluminium briefcases

    Fingers crossed I never need to use them

    Kev
     
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  2. Hardcoaler

    Hardcoaler TrainBoard Member

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    Good advice Kev. Santa gave me a 1TB HD portable drive for Christmas and it's plenty enough for all my junk.
     
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  3. BoxcabE50

    BoxcabE50 HOn30 & N Scales Staff Member TrainBoard Supporter

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    I have all of my information triple backed up. Hopefully that makes it fairly safe.
     
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  4. kevsmith

    kevsmith TrainBoard Member

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    Not forgetting Obsolete storage as well.

    I was explaining 5 inch floppy disks to my granddaughter the other day and she thought I was making it up.

    I went through the list of other relics for her

    loading video games off a cassete tape

    cassete tapes themselves

    8 tracks

    Betamax tape players

    VHS tape players, VHS tapes, Compact VHS camcorders

    8mm camcorders

    12" video discs

    Compact flash cards

    Home burnt DVDs. try them a few years later and pray they still work

    I then explained why my Vynil record collection still works, still sounds better than CDs and becomes more valuable every day and why I'm still buying it today.

    Analogue rules

    Kev
     
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  5. kevsmith

    kevsmith TrainBoard Member

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    Hi all

    Just trying to keep you all reminded to back up your hard drive files. My new year resolution is to invest in some extra HDD drives. These memory hungry little beasts need a lot of care and planning

    So looking at the Excel Image spreadsheets for digital photos and Camcorder HD files taken in 2023 the numbers are staggering. Same number of images as Raw files. See below

    43.3 Gb of space taken up with JPEGs. 5185 images in total

    192GB of High Def clips, 985 in total

    So the usual plan. Back-up them all onto cold storage drives, kept dormant and isloated in case the worst case scenario happens to the drives connected to the main PC and the House I.T network

    What I have started to do is move all the RAW format photo files onto a completely separate Hard Drive. If the JPEG folders go 'Tits' I can always recover the images off the RAWs

    The weather in the Lake District over Christmas, has been pretty rotten but today, on New Years Day we had a brief window where the sun came out, the rain stopped and the wind dropped. I got some quizical looks from the Askam Signaller when I turned up at the station at lunchtime and photograhed a fairly, Hum-drum, passenger Diesel Railcar.

    156 417 looks pretty much like all the rest except that the last time I photographed it was in Gainsborough in Lincolnshire in 1992

    Taken on either Fuji Reala or Velvia 35mm Colour transparency. Looking careworn in the old Regional Railways livery, The scan needs some work on the blemishes in the sky. But all the original Black and White and Color negatives and Kodachromes and Fuji transparencies are safe and can always be revisited

    [​IMG]

    Tidied up and given the current Northern Rail livery after transfer from the Midlands to the Cumbrian Coast

    [​IMG]

    As I finish typing this my P.C is churning away, copying my Japanese Image files from the P2 drive onto the Y Drive. This could take some time!

    Time for a beer and watch some College Football ( And dare I hope, in the NFL, the Cleveland Browns. in some way, Do It?)

    Kev
     
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  6. kevsmith

    kevsmith TrainBoard Member

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    To add to the frustration of watching a computer whirring away to itself I decided to plug each of the Cold drives in turn into the laptop to check if they needed de-fragging. Some didn't but the first HD files one I connected did. Cue a green bar slowly going across the dialogue box as the processor chugs away. This could also take some time!

    Kev
     
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  7. kevsmith

    kevsmith TrainBoard Member

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    So, Bored watching 'green process bars' going across the screen I decided to pop the side panel off the P.C to see how much muck was in the power supply, fans and Motherboar/Processor cooling fins. Filthy!

    I normally blitz it about every six months. Unplug everything and take the tower out to workshop and blast every nook and cranny with the workshop compressor and the blower nozzle. it is scary how much dust and fluff come out. Both the tower fan and the Corsair power supply seem to suck everything in the room in

    Kev
     
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  8. Todd Hackett

    Todd Hackett TrainBoard Member

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    Hay Kev!

    Got a couple of Dell's sitting on the floor; when I decide to blow them out the resultant dust/hair/crap pile just rolls out. I found that if I put them up on a brick/2x10 or the like, not as much stuff in them. Guess the brick/2x10 are dust magnets? Not! I do know that dog hair stays on the floor once it clumps together, but I digress.

    Later
     
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