A question of hard drive capacity

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How much house is enough?

This question of hard drive space is the classic question of storage and asset preservation narrowed down to digital life. How many filing cabinets do you need? How big a cellar? How much attic space? Like all these questions, the answer is driven by both how wide-ranging your interests are and how much of a pack rat you are. Clearly, a "Thoreau" wouldn't need much at all, whereas the library of congress . . .

It seems to me that there are two problems: first, what you like to do. I like to avoid having to prowl through CD and DVD racks to find an album or movie, so I want it all stored digitally and accessible across my network. If I've watched a movie in the first place, there's actually a pretty fair chance I'll want to watch it again - much like the case with CDs. That's why I have about 4 terabytes on line now. I bought a Vaio DVD changer and used it to copy all my CDs, which are now in a cellar box, and all my DVDs, using DVD Decrypter, so I can watch and listen to what I want anywhere in the house, any time. Likewise, about 50% of the photos (scanned) I have (all of the digital photos, of course) are on disk now. And I might well digitize videotapes, audio tapes (bought a unit to do this), videotapes created from old 8mm home movies from my Dad's generation, and old 45 and 33 vinyl (bought a unit to do that, as well). I will probably also copy the few old reel-to-reel tapes I have before the tape drive dies, and I might experiment with my Dad's 78's. This sounds like Pack Rat Extreme Edition, but it results in significant space compression as well - an external 750GB drive isn't very big - and is really an experiment in how far you can go, rather than a practical undertaking for most. The family room is much less cluttered without the CDs and DVDs around, though.

What I have found out so far, however, is enlightening, and the root of the second problem. Apart from the fact that it takes oodles of time to do photo scanning and vinyl copying, once the job is done, you need at least twice the space so that you can back it up. The initial capture effort involves a lot of labor, and the data is of significant value - both entertainment-wise and with regard to its value to the family (photos and home videos). Right now, I duplicate it on at least one other drive, but in the long term, I worry. It needs to be on a non-magnetic, non-attached archival medium that can be stored off site, if it is to be preserved and safe from power failures. If it were just entertainment, and could be automatically recovered from originals, it wouldn't be so bad - but it isn't. The photos, tapes (family singing and talking from the '40's and '50's, videos of great-grandparents from 8mm), etc., which represent the highest value data, are the hardest to re-digitize.

As a one-time optical disk industry guy, I'm all too familiar with the failure of optical disk lifetime claims, which makes me wary of trusting the media as a backup. In addition, the media capacity advantage over magnetics never really materialized. Even Blu-Ray won't do the trick for a half-dozen terabytes. The only solution I see is to move it forward onto ever newer magnetic storage media, as a continuous process, forever. Fortunately, now that it's digital, that's possible - but not carefree; it's an archivist's life.

Posted by: gsteele531@...   Posted on: 09/04/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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