Oddly enough, I went the other way around, from using a vacuum-loading-self-threading 9-track tape drive to back up Sun workstations as an undergrad, to using DEC TK50 tapes to back up my research from my department's DECStation as a grad student.
If you really want to go off the deep end, I started with punch cards and punched tape... I might even still have some of my thesis stuff on punched tape and DEC tapes, but I have no idea of where to go to read them. (I expect that there are commercial services if I became interested.)
I tried various tape solutions for home in the mid 90's. Often they would back up but never restore. The parallel-port connected ones were terrible. One model went back having never worked for me.
Yeah--tape drives were finicky high-maintenance devices. I hope the current ones are better.
These days disks (I also just bought a pair of 3TB disks for just under $150 each - Western Digital, Doug?) are so cheap they're definitely the way to go for backups.
Yep--WD. But Seagate was only ~$10 more.
Long-term archival, that's a different story. I think these days it's best to just have all your long-term archives right on your computer along with your current stuff, and just keep it all backed-up together, that way it goes with you as technology goes forward.
I agree (for most home users). Long term backup is a serious issue. Not only do you have to have the medium survive, you still have to have the hardware and software to read it. Writeable CDROMs/DVDs do not have a very long lifetime. (~10yrs, IIRC. I have an article somewhere analyzing their archival properties.) Disks (and other media) have to be rewritten or copied every now and then. (The government has warehouses of decaying tapes... I have read that much of the Apollo Moon Landing data has been lost because the tapes cannot be read anymore.)
I too keep my long-term archives on my main disk and all of its backups. Whenever a disk has failed (typ 3-5 yrs), I've always had everything saved to a backup and when I replace the disk I upgrade all of my disks (main plus backups) with larger new ones. I've had no significant losses so far (18yrs)...
This thread has drifted from camera memory cards to short-term and long-term backups. IMO, it is all part of a continuum of protecting your images and other data from loss. While few home users can afford professional class backup systems, knowing how professionals do it may help them to do a better job themselves. And given enough time, all disks will crash or data will be lost from them...
BTW1:, Some high-end cameras (eg Canon 5D Mk 3) have two card slots and can simultaneously write your images to two cards to give you a backup from the start. I have read of cases where data was lost from one card but preserved on the other.
BTW2: Perform routine test restores of a couple files from the backups into a test directory (folder for PC users) to make sure the backups are fully functional. There are many tales of woe where someone's backups appeared to go well but they could not restore when needed.
BTW3: Perform frequent backups. Disks are relatively unreliable and the data you save is your own.
Doug
