I’ll need a few months of glitch-free operation before this is more than provisional, but it looks like the Drobo is a pretty good solution for off-site backup. The good: Using bare drives is a real plus. There’s no time wasted bolting the drives into trays, and they take up the least room in the… [Read More]
Archives for 2009
More fun with the Drobo
When we last looked at the Drobos, one of them was causing the OS to insert disk errors in the error log. I had also noticed that VVEngine couldn’t complete one large file transfer. It turned out that the two events occurred simultaneously, suggesting a common cause. I used Windows Explorer to transfer a much… [Read More]
Life with Drobo
Anybody remember Jerry Pournelle’s column in Byte Magazine? In the spirit of that long-running account of Jerry’s struggles with technology, here’s a blow-by-blow of my experiences with the Drobo boxes. You are welcome to enjoy a bit of schadenfreude. Conclusions in the next post. I ordered the first box from Amazon. It arrived in two… [Read More]
New off-site backup options
Only eighteen months have passed since I wrote the paper on backing up photographic images, but there have been some changes that affect the off-site component of the backup strategy that I proposed in that paper. The biggest difference is the price reduction of one terabyte disks. It’s now hovering close to a hundred bucks… [Read More]
Paper Selection
Maybe you’re getting tired of reading about blind spots. I know I’m getting a little tired of writing about them. I promised to give it a rest, but first I’ve got a few things to say about one of the most frustrating things in modern digital photography: paper selection. I’ll go through it without the… [Read More]