Whew. A bad feeling has been nagging me for the last months. As the amount of video data that I have collected for my Ph.D. thesis began to fill up the external 200 GB hard disk I became more and more aware of the fact that hard disks sometimes fail for no reason at all. Or they get dropped. Or they get accidentally erased. Or the buildings where they are stored burn down. All of these are good reasons to make backups. But how does one backup such an amount of data? One choice would have been to buy another hard disk. For that I didn’t have the money. Therefore I decided to do what I should have done in the first place: always keep a backup on DV tape. That is a pretty inexpensive solution (about € 3 per 60 min tape – one GB of DV equals slightly less than five minutes; enjoy the calculation), and it is adequate to the data. May my sleep be easy and relaxed!
Tags: backup, hard drive