3.5" or 2.5" HD more reliable?

[Octarine]

Backup and Redundancy setup are 2 separate stuff.
If you want to archive your picture,
then Backup is the more idea solution.[...]

So is backup and archiving - their are different in scope and technology. Although, here for images it's less critical than for business data. Backup is to restore the working data in the shortest period of time. Archiving is the long-term storing over multiple years, preserving the files for future usage. Here, also the necessary software (binaries) must be considered. If one of the camera makers decides to abandon a certain file format then the last version of the respective program must be included in the archiving. Alternatively one can use file formats without a specific binding to a certain software / camera maker, e.g. DNG. Open formats have a much greater chance to be supported in long terms.

 

[LiuLangMao]

just to share some idea of backing up. every 6 mths I will buy a 2.5" or 3.5" HDD, I will not get the latest, nor the biggest capacity. I normally look at the cost, around sgd100+ I will get it. the logic is to get different batch, cos HDD issue normally affect 1 batch only, and normally the newer model.
so moral of the story is get mature technology. dun be the sucker to be test subject or R&D pay master for the HDD manufacturer.

over the years I have already brought 9 hdd, mixture of 160gb and 320gb. and 4 of them hold the exact copy of all my pic, and every time I want to edit any pic, just copy out to the PC.
when have new pic, make an effort to copy to these HDD at the earilest time (or at least to 1or2 of them first.)

these pic are my travelling memory, just think of how much the trip cost, and all these troublesome practice will seems priceless.

I do not want to wait for the HDD to fail and than start a thread asking "where to find cheap data recovery??" or "HELP!! HDD FAIL". go to HWZ forum you can see ppl starting such thread asking for help. it cost hundreds of even thousand of dollars for data recovery.
if with different brand, different batch of HDD, and all of them still FAIL at the same time, than i must say its destiny to lose these pic.

 

[geekbrains]

Thank you for your feedback.

Appreciate.

You're most welcome

 

[geekbrains]

Most IBM's died with the same pattern: rhythmic 'click - click' of about 1s. Thermal calibration error. Only two had other issues. The result was always the same: no data access, everything lost. Luckily most of them only carried only the OS partitions.
What bugged me also were the recommendations about environmental conditions. I try to monitor my disks with smartmontools, the reading shows the temperature of the internal sensor. But in most documentations one can only find the air temperature, mostly without consideration of a cooling fan and the resulting cooling by airflow. Even a question to IBM support was fruitless, I only got standard template answers.

That was the most common pattern of failure at that time for IBM HDD's. It's true that some of the notebooks were designed with a very poor ventilation / cooling design that caused the death of these drives as well.

Their support for OEM / Retail drives was a joke

 

[geekbrains]

So is backup and archiving - their are different in scope and technology. Although, here for images it's less critical than for business data. Backup is to restore the working data in the shortest period of time. Archiving is the long-term storing over multiple years, preserving the files for future usage. Here, also the necessary software (binaries) must be considered. If one of the camera makers decides to abandon a certain file format then the last version of the respective program must be included in the archiving. Alternatively one can use file formats without a specific binding to a certain software / camera maker, e.g. DNG. Open formats have a much greater chance to be supported in long terms.

Exactly! Couldn't have said better than this!

In Linux, I use rsync to synchronize my data across my multiple machines. Whereas in Windows, I use the free tool from MS (MS SyncToy 2.0) which is not only NOOB friendly but also relatively faster

For archival, it's usually a gunzipped tarball in a DVD or multiple DVD's . If it requires insane amount of DVD's, then it would be archived on a separate external disk.