Saving data can be cheap.

On Tuesday October 26, I presented at the SF Cutters meeting and gave a rundown of my personal method for storing data in the most inexpensive way possible. One of the things I DIDN’T mention is that you should always have two copies of everything.  The reason for that is that hard drives DO die. You should also seriously consider having two locations to store your two copies. We live in an earthquake region and bad things DO happen here in the Bay Area.

 Make sure you don’t miss Part 2 where I talk about how to FIND everything you’ve stored. 

Below is the “shopping list” of the products that I use. 

1. OEM Hard Drives - www.amazon.com

2. UPDATE: USB3 Trayless Drive Dock - USB3 Drive Bay

3. Storage Box for Drive - www.tapplastics.com
    Silicon Sleeve - www.tigerdirect.com
    Weibetech Sleaves - www.weibetech.com
    Hard Drive Drawer- www.tigerdirect.com

4. Storage Box for Boxes - www.ikea.com

and don’t forget

5. Disk Tracker Software - www.disktracker.com

Remember, this is not the fastest method, this is not the most LONG LASTING system, and there are many people that will tell you I’m NUTS for storing data this way. However, I manage about 100TB of data this way and have used it for about 10 years. So, take that for what its worth.

Comments

[Jeff DeMello]

Chris ... thanks for your great presentation last night at the San Francisco Cutters meeting. It's always enjoyable to hear your ideas, which are presented with such enthusiasm!

[Chris Faber]

Chris -- great talk last night. Just a quick question for my notes: which style of box at tapplastic is the right size? Is it style "C" or style "F". Also I saw you had a padding material of some kind in there -- what do you use for that?

Thanks!

~ Chris

[Chris Fenwick]

i use the "C" box... white and clear... no padding...

[Carl]

Good tip about placing your hard drives on a SEPARATE surface from your speakers. I have two worktables - one for the computer and a completely separate table near it - not touching the computer table - for the drives.Of course, the drive that most often fails for me is the one IN the computer. sigh.

[Aaron]

Hey Chris, great tips here. Just curious what the distinction is for you in using this single - drive solution versus a dual tray drive or somesuch. is it the ease of swapping the drives? curious about scenarios where you might want more than 1.5 TB accessible, or would want to be transferring between drives and the like.

[Chris Fenwick]

good comments Aaron... at the facility that I go to adopt this system we manage nearly 100TB of data all stored away in the plastic boxes and cardboard cartons from IKEA... so, if by saying, you want to "have more data accessible", you mean, can you have have ALL your data accessible... thats not likely... but we do have a few of these enclosures that live around the facility and we can also use the house gigabit network to move files if need be.

there are ways to get two of these trayless drives in one enclosure too.

[Jeff DeMello]

Chris ... just wanted to make another comment ... I purchased the white plastic storage boxes from Tap Plastics and I LOVE THEM! I've packed away all 15 of my (what used to be just in static-free bags) hard drives in them and they fit perfectly! I don't, however, keep them in an Ikea box, I keep them in a drawer ... they fit 7 across perfectly!

I also have downloaded and used the Disktracker software.

I'm a happy camper! :-)

[Chris Fenwick]

Jeff... That's awesome! I'm glad the storage system is working for you. Disk Tracker is a real gem too. I wish I could get a commission on some of these bits and bobs I'm pimping. ;-)

Don't forget TWO copies in TWO locations for a true "backup"!!

Cheers.

[Paige]

Hi Chris,
I saw your presentation on this at SF Cutters and am going to start using your system in the new year!
I'm looking at the Trayless Drive Bay on weibetech.com and have a question for you: I edit on a new iMac with only one FireWire port. :-( So, I'm wondering if it would be worth buying the $292 RTX100H-Q that has 2 (or 3?) firewire ports in the back. Do you know if it would it work well to daisy chain through this drive? Or should I just get the $225 model?
Thanks a million!
Paige

[Paige]

Also,
Is this the oem drive you're recommending? The SATA stuff is confusing me?
http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Barracuda-7200RPM-Internal-ST31500341AS-Bare/dp/B00066IJPQ/ref=sr_1_fkmr3_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1291345017&sr=8-1-fkmr3

Thanks again!
Paige

[Chris Fenwick]

That will do... good price eh?

[Travis Wilber]

Saw this in Macworld:
http://www.newertech.com/products/voyagerq.php

It's the same as the enclosure box right?

[Michael Kroh]

Hey Chris, thanks so much for posting this.

I've been using this system for about 8 months now and loving it. I've bought about 5 of the OEM drives that you recommended (the Seagate Barracuda 7200 1.5 TB 7200RPM SATA 3Gb/s 32MB Cache 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Drive ST31500341AS-Bare Drive) for about $80 each.

I recently noticed that those drives are now selling for around $200-$300 each. Do you have another reliable OEM drive recommendation that's selling for a more reasonable price?

Thanks so much.
Michael

[Steve M.]

Hey Chris,

Listened to the recent podcast that turned me on to this data storage method. I've been looking for something like this and I thank you for posting it. That particular Weibetech enclosure in your presentation, I don't see on Weibetechs site? I know you're not a big FCPX user, which I am, but in the case of storage, you might want to approach that differently because of FCPX being just one big database. The downside to a database is if any project gets corrupt FCPX will not launch, and you'd better pray you're backup FCPX project does work. I've had one incident where the backup didn't work either and the only way back into FCPX was to delete that particular project from the finder. Using your storage method with FCPX I would suggest utilizing Steve Martin's sparse disk image method. The beauty of this is, none of your projects will load upon launching FCPX. Only the disk images you've opened will appear in FCPX just like any other mounted drive. In the case of having a 1TB OEM drive filled with projects, it would be silly to have FCPX load every single project, which it will do if you don't store them as a disk image. Anyway, thanks again, great stuff!

[antalya su tesisati]

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This is really a tremendous site.