Hi Tony,
Several elements there, some of which are slightly complex. However,
there are some very simple things you can do which can work very well.
A. I'd strongly recommend augmenting system backups with specific backup
of any special data you may identify.
A very easy approach (whch we have used successfully for several years)
is to
(1)find/buy a networked PC with a large hard disk and a DVD writer,
preferably in a different building from your server.
(2)Then using the Control Panel scheduler (under Windows - similar
things under OS X, Linux etc) schedule a nightly xcopy or zip (or etc)
backup of your particularly useful/sensitive/important data to this
machine's local hard drive (contact me off list if you want more
guidance on this)
(3) Periodically burn the backed-up files to DVD(s)
(4) Keep these somewhere else for the long term.
This will give you an independent and easily accessible archive of your
important data. It's not a replacement for traditional tape or
disk-array backup, but ensures that you have your data in a format you
can control, and for which you can implement your own retention policy.
B. I've not had much experience of DVD or CD disk failure (certainly
much less than 10% per year, even on 5 year old disks), but no fixed
medium CD/DVD/paper) is really permanent - for permanance, you need to
keep copying it (cf biological reproduction)...
C. Re file corruption, there are many utilities (some open-source) which
can monitor changes to files (using checksums such as MD5). However,
they are mostly fairly complex, and may not distinguish between
desirable edits and inadvertent ones, so you'll need an adminstrative
process which distinguishes these. If it's your RAW files which you want
to preserve in a pristine state, it may help to simply set the read-only
file attribute for all of these (eg attrib +R /s f:\myimages\raw\*.*)
This won't address disk corruption (which is a whole different issue -
have a good server with RAID disk arrays) but will mostly stop crashed
applications from leaving broken files behind, or users inadvertently
modifying things.
Must go and do some work now...
John
Dr JW Faithfull
Hunterian Museum Annexe
University of Glasgow Thurso St Building
13 Thurso St
Glasgow
G11 6PE
Tel: 0141 330 4213
Fax: 0141 330 8001
Email: [log in to unmask]
**************************************************
For mcg information and to manage your subscription to the list, visit the website at http://www.museumscomputergroup.org.uk
**************************************************
|