External Hard Drives

[leslan80]

 I need to purchase a couple of external hard drives for work.  One will house our collection of scanned photographs while the other will probably house our database information.  I do know that currently photographs total about 200 MB, so we'll need a hard drive that will allow us to grow -- not all photographs are scanned.  Any suggestions?  

Comments

[sidbyrd]

The brand of drive is less important; the critical thing is to have a backup, to make sure that backups are actually happening regularly and copying the right things, and to test that the backed-up data is actually restorable. Keeping at least the last two versions of everything, all on different disks, is good if you have the space. I basically do the digital archives for Fondren, and I would probably start to twitch if anything important were just stored on a portable drive. If you backup right, though, the brand of drive isn't especially important.

(FWI, we have our data on a redundant clustered filesystem that stores parity information, so if one or two disks in the cluster fail, the data remains safe. We use library archive software that computes checksums of every file on a regular basis and compares them to a stored value on another disk, just to make sure that we catch any corruption problems soon after they happen. We have backups on-campus and in a data center several miles away. We also subscribe to an inter-university service where we all copy each others' data, so even in a Houston-wide disaster, our most important things would still be okay at another university (although it would surely be a pain to recover). You may not have the technical staff to do all of that, but it's the sort of thing that can be done with medium-sized IT resources like Rice has, just as an example I happen to be familiar with.)

[leslan80]

What technical staff?

Basically, I have four different computer housing pieces of the library, archives and collections information. So, one houses the catalogue of photographs (in Access, nonetheless) but that computer is not hooked up to the network. I have another computer that houses the database for the archives and library (Re:Discovery is the database) and another computer that houses the scans of our collection of photographs. There's another computer that houses some additional information. It's a headache.

So I want to use the external hard drives to consolidate all this information in these different places. I went with a 1TB Western Digital drive that can network. Ideally, I'd like to house the database(s) on it so that multiple computers can access it. I also bought another 1TB Western Digital drive to have to store/back-up data.

My boss is working on getting some IT help to set us up for the present ... and the future. The whole IT set-up at the museum is a nightmare ... there's a computer that is acting as the server with almost all computers networked to it. But things are well organized and we have no one on staff who really understands how it works; the staff has been relying on someone's husband for troubleshooting help. My predecessor used zip drives, DVDs and flash drives as back-ups. I don't know much, but I do know that's probably not good.

Given that we have a full-time staff of 12, our current needs aren't big ... most members only need basic computer applications (word-processing, microsoft office, email). The development people (there are two) use specific databases for their work (I don't know about these) and I need a lot of storage space for my database needs. But other than that, I'm not sure what we should have in order to grow in the future. Sid or whoever, any suggestions? Like I said, my boss is meeting on Friday with someone about this.