Iomega Rev Drives - 35GB Cartridge

Storage is always a problem!

I've got various hard disks in various machines that are all networked together (both Windows and FreeBSD), also DVD burners and a DDS-4 tape system.

If you want a fire safe (as I'm considering - more for the business data than the digital photographs, though the photos could usefully go in a fire safe as well), you really need a data grade one, which is much more expensive than a conventional fire safe. That's the only way that relatively fragile media such as DDS-4 are going to survive. However, you have to be a little careful with fire safes, in that if there's a serious fire, the building might collapse onto the safe making its retrieval awkward and its survival questionable.

One way around this is to duplicate media and store the duplicates off site, but where off site is another problem, especially as media left in a car probably won't survive that long (the temperatures inside a locked car can be troublesome). There are organisations that you can ship duplicate backup media to and get them to ship it back to you (either after a certain time for re-use, or on request), but the pricing of these services is probably out of all but businesses.

If you choose to take personal backup media to work, be careful that your employer's policies don't throw up problems by doing so - some employers may not be happy with data media being carried on and off their premises, and other employers may try to claim that your data is theirs if it's on their premises.

The question for now is how to make use of the storage I have. Probably the right way is to back up photos to DVD+RW as I go, leaving the data on my main hard disks where it will be backed up to tape until I've put it somewhere more secure than DVD+RW. DDS-4 is more a backup than an archival medium - retrieval is too awkward.

Long term storage is a different issue. Making use of a couple of DVD-Rs (ideally different brands) every time I generate 4GBytes or so of pictures is obvious - but I probably do need a large hard disk somewhere to keep an 'on line' copy of my pictures.

The one thing I won't be doing is buying a cartridge hard drive or similar proprietary system - as has already been said in the thread, such systems tend to be quite fragile and they do go obsolete after a while. Removable optical media tends to be more robust than removable magnetic, but as we all know, writeable CD and DVD (and even more so, rewriteable CD and DVD) media can fail.

One intriguing possibility for backup of working data is that DVD-RAM seems to be coming in from the cold a little. The generation of DVD drives that will arrive in the next couple of months includes a couple of models that will have 16x DVD-RAM capabilities.

DVD-RAM media tends to be much more expensive than DVD-RW or DVD+RW, but it doesn't require packet writing software and can be rewritten many more times. It can also run, albeit with a speed penalty, in a verify after write fashion.


David

David,

A very thoughtful response. Thanks for adding your thoughts to this thread.

--gmaize

The Rev is increasingly popular in smaller servers where it backs up a typical 73gb SCSI drive using its 2:1 compression. It is fast, extremely reliable and is available with various interfaces, even SATA. It is nothing like the old Iomega products like Zip with the click of death issues.

One of the reasons it has become so popular is its speed of backup. DVD may be an alternative but it is slow and has limited capacity per disk, which often means you have to break up your backup. The Rev should be regarded as a backup device for system/data recovery, not archive. If you want to keep the best of your images for 10 or 20 years, then archive them to optical and be prepared to move to whatever becomes the next generation as backup/archive goes through massive changes over the next couple of years.

I work in a large backup facility. Big companies mainly use tapes that can store 200-400gb compressed... but the media and the drives are quite expensive. Smaller capacity tapes are also used like the DDS-4, but they can also be expensive for home use. Personally from all I have learned here, I think the best idea for home use is buy 2 or more hard drives and external encloseures with firewire or usb interface.

Now the following can vary quite a bit depending on how important the data is to you...

Lets just say that it's fairly important :
If you are using 2 drives, well I say at the end of every month (or weekly if you have alot of data) do a full backup of the folders the pictures are stored in. Then find a friend down the street or a relative that lives not to far away and ask if you can store the drive at their house(or a fellow photographer doing the same thing as you.... he/she may be more understanding). The next month use a second drive to do the full backup on, take that to their house, bring the other one back and store it at home. This way you have one backup that is up to date and one almost up to date and the data is in 2 locations. In the event one is destroyed you don't lose everything. This isn't really that failsafe but the more complicated you make it for yourself the less likely you are to actually do it.

here's a little summary:

January - do a backup on drive1 take it offsite
February - do the backup on drive2 take offsite
- bring drive1 back onsite
March - - do the backup on drive1 take offsite
- bring drive2 back onsite

That's just how I would to it if I had anything that important. And you could use more drives so you can keep more points that you can restore to, and store the drives at more than 2 locations but I'm not that paranoid.... if an astroid destroys my block I think I won't be too concerned about my backups

ohh and a piece of advice.... do a test restore every once and a while on another computer to make sure the backups actually work

KennyG;
I think you are the first in this thread to have a positive comment on the Rev drive. Is this from any personal experience or not? I like the tip about "optical storage", I'll keep that in mind along with the thought that I should probably shy away from trying to predict where the technology of data storage may or may not go in the years ahead. I will remember that one should always plan on upgrading their long term storage on a semi-regular basis, so one doesn't get behind the curve.

func_u;
Indeed I will consider additionally the need to backup the backup and make arragements for offsite storage. Thanks for your input, as well.

--gmaize

Ok let me give some personal experience with the rev drive. I purchased one of these drives to use as a backup device for my work. I am a network admin and we had a non networked PC that runs some lab equipment and we needed a cheap solution for backups. I received the rev last week and spent some time testing it before deploying to my lap PC. This thing is a TOTAL piece of junk. There is no way to write to the drive without having special (and crappy) Iomega software loaded. I am not talking drivers, I am talking system tray application buggy crap software. Most backup software won’t recognize it as a drive. Windows shows it as a CDrom.

Long story short... DONT GET IT!

I'll take issue with that. I have experience of Revs being used in a hosting centre for 5 racks of 20 x 2U servers per rack and they have performed faultlessly for the year they have been in. I have first hand personal experience of using the drive with Veritas Backup Exec and it is excellent. It also works with just about every other mainstream backup software. So, where this idea it only works with their software comes from makes me wonder about the experience of the admin in charge.