First re the backup, and woeful lack of it in my case - this is so so true. So much effort could have been avoided if I had. The sad thing is that this is not the first time I have experienced significant data loss due to hard drive failure. In this case although I had previously used backups, I mistakenly thought SSDs were super robust, and had moved a load of new data (these photos mainly, a few thousand of them) from camera SD cards to the SSD while I organised it ready for moving to the backup machine. I then reused the SD cards :-( The 'organising' project took longer than expected due to family illness and I forgot the vulnerable data sitting on the SSD, thinking it 'safe as houses' anyway. Meanwhile the power supply developed a fault. Only then did I discover SSDs pitfalls.
Even so my old backup solution was, I can see now, not good enough. A fire or lightning strike would for instance destroy all my data, but also many other scenarios might. I now have a system which keeps 5 copies distributed over 2 locations several miles apart, using different OSes and formatting systems. One is usually offline. I think I still have holes in the system though and am looking to change a few aspects of it. I use spinning rust now, because it can usually be recovered from, certainly a lot easier than SSD. SSD tech I now realise is a complete nightmare, since a power failure at the wrong time can cause what I have - an extremely difficult, if possible at all, to recover drive.
As for optical media, I am wary of it, having had issues in the past with copies becoming unreadable several years later. Maybe poor quality as you say though. The other problem with it is I have around 3TB of to me very important data, once you figure in the video taken over the last few years, and optical with its small size takes time to use and make several copies of. I like HDDs now because they are very large, and as you say they are extremely mature. Data recovery companies usually have excellent success with them if required, the only severe failure mode is physical damage to the disk and with multiple copies in more than one location the chances of all having physical damage is very low. And they can be tasked to do their job reliably even when I am in periods of life when I am not being reliable!
A second storage technology would be nice but I wonder about the reliability of the higher density stuff. I must admit I didn't know some can hold up to 128GB before looking it up just now, and its something to look into certainly. A few optical backups on some media which can be trusted would be certainly nice to have.
Ill get back to the technical now in another post.
In reply to Re: Adding cols to 3d arrays - syntax
by peterrowse
in thread Adding cols to 3d arrays - syntax
by peterrowse
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