Saturday, December 08, 2007

Digital Media Realibality

On the 29th of Nov I put my computer into standby and went to bed. When I woke up on Friday the 30th, I hit the power button and nothing happened. Well I take that back, the machine powered up but no beeps, no peeps, and as far as I could tell no creeps.

After this I quickly realized that my Lightroom database (not my photos) is saved in the default place (My Documents), and that my system drive is on my Raid 0 array that lives off of my motherboard. Yes I do have backups of my LRDB but I think they are all over a month old. So what I am hopping for is that when I get my new board I can rebuild the array with out destroying the existing array.

This quickly made me realize that my plan of having my LRDB and Images Primary and Main back live on a motherboard Raid 1 (Mirror) is also a bad idea. I would still have a raid tied to a motherboard raid controller. Aka my backup is not readable by another machine.

So I now have a plan of attack to backup my LRDB and Images. It is really simple and not dependent on any hardware. I have 2 500G SATA drives that I got to build into that RAID 1. I ordered 2 external eSATA/USB enclosures to put the drives in. So now I plug both drives into my machine (I would like to still also run a Data storage drive so I am going to have to figure out if I can boot with a drive plugged into my secondary controller). For this we will call them Main and Backup. After duplicating all the my images to both drives here is how I will set up Lightroom. LR has a auto copy when importing. That I will point to dupe my import to 'Backup'. LR also has a feature to backup your LRDB. I will set it to backup every time I start to 'Backup'. More importantly I am going to change my save place LRDB to a place on 'Main'.

Now if I have a system failure I just yank Main and Backup and move them to my spare machine with a generic controller. I can also yank this and take it over to a friends house or such. Even better when I get a laptop this same system is scalable to that.

Well if all works out I should have my machine back up sometime the week before Christmas.

--MikeD

No comments: