Well, it finally happened. I have 12 TB

[Robert Maxwell]

Jeez...

I have a 1TB external drive, a 250GB external from several years back, and then one laptop with 120GB, and another with 160GB. So I guess I'm around 1.5TB right now, and I'm nowhere near full. You're nuts, SWC!

 

[Jadzia]

If you care about preserving your data, you have to think about the possibilities of things like:

-- A nasty virus infecting all connected drives simultaneously and zeroing their bootsectors.
-- Lightning striking nearby power cables, destroying all wired up electronics.
-- A house fire.
-- Burglary.
-- Computer items being seized by police if an accusation is ever made against you.

All of these are unlikely, but it is best to be contingent if your data is precious to you, or represents many many hours of work. You may want to consider having remote backups.

 

[Kira's Mom]

12???? I was impressed when my mom's new desktop had 1 TB!!!!

 

[TheBrew]

I would be more impressed if you used it all for unique data instead of backups.

On the flip side, I am impressed by all of your backups. Can never be too safe with your important data.

 

[Geckothan]

If you care about preserving your data, you have to think about the possibilities of things like:

-- A nasty virus infecting all connected drives simultaneously and zeroing their bootsectors.
-- Lightning striking nearby power cables, destroying all wired up electronics.
-- A house fire.
-- Burglary.
-- Computer items being seized by police if an accusation is ever made against you.

All of these are unlikely, but it is best to be contingent if your data is precious to you, or represents many many hours of work. You may want to consider having remote backups.

This. And take the backup drives offline when you aren't using them so there's no risk of them crashing/being infected by anything.

 

[Omnius]

The problem was, I was NEVER getting things down off the shelf and putting up with all the 'FBI Warning' stuff. Things would just sit on my shelf.

Now I can switch to the Apple TV, open up the Remote app on my iPhone and search for any DS9, Simpsons, or Futurama episode by typing in its name. And bam...there it is! As a result I actually watch all this stuff I paid for AND I can switch between shows quickly without re-loading disks...waiting for FBI warnings...etc.

In addition I can decide to just drag 1 onto my cell phone on the days when I know my coworkers are going to be away for lunch. Gonna be alone for my lunch break? Ok, here, I'll take a Futurama with me. I'd never take a laptop and a DVD to work to do that. It just wouldn't happen.

Similarly, if we're going on an airplane I can throw my daughter's favorite movies on the laptop the night before in about 10 minutes and I don't take up any extra space in my carry-on bags.

So yeah, it took time, but it's the difference between actually watching these things and hardly ever watching them. It was well worth the time it took.

Whenever I have my own place (again) I'm going for a similar setup. Digital media (without DRM) is the future!

You got them in a RAID configuration?

Two of the four internal drives are RAIDed for speed. I use that for the video files that I edit. I know that doubles the chance of failure there, which is another reason backups are important.

The other "RAID" I have isn't exactly a RAID. It's a Drobo robot which acts like a RAID by keeping data redundant on 2 different drives, but it's not really a RAID. It's a mini-computer that is keeping track of stuff and moving it around when it needs to. Any 1 of the drives in that thing could fail and I can just pop it out and replace it and I'm done!

Buddy of mine also swears by RAID1. He once lost all his media and vowed that'd never happen again. I'm still a bit uneasy with having just half the diskspace :/.
I have 4.5TB and the disks are located in my server, but it's kinda noisy. It's a bigtower case with 4x 15cm fans, which nickname is Arrakis (or vacuum cleaner by my dad).
Your Drobo looks very neat.

 

[Small White Car]

If you care about preserving your data, you have to think about the possibilities of things like:

I mentioned it somewhere earlier, but I use Mozy for that. So I've got remote backups too, but that's an ongoing process. MOZY says I have unlimited space but my ISP disagrees when it comes to bandwidth.

I've been slowly uploading a little bit at a time every night for months. Eventually it'll all get uploaded!

I started with the photos and home movies, so I'm going from 'most' to 'least' important.

(Good news is, if my house burns down Mozy will mail me my data on firewire drives...I don't have to DOWNLOAD it all to get it back!)

Your Drobo looks very neat.

I like it but I had to mess with it to get Apple's Time Machine software to use it. You have to get a special script program from the Drobo people to run on it before TM will even see it and it STILL has a bug where I can't use the TM "flying through space" UI to get old files back. That won't 'see' the Drobo for some reason.

But other than that it works. I could restore the whole computer from it or I can use Finder to search out individual files. So it works, I just don't get the cool eye candy.

But hey, my Mac automatically backs up to the Drobo and then the Drobo automatically spreads stuff around to protect me from a drive failure. I can't ask for more than that!