What are you guys doing with your digital files?

[beeman458]

I remember how those ole eight inch floppies were quite the thing:)

 

Believe it or not, shortly after posing this question, which had to do with future casting thirty years down the road as we discuss contemporary storage and backup solutions, my system decided to become quit the wobbly top.

 

Why a system becomes unstable, I don't have a clue, but they do and we're stuck with the story that goes along with it.

 

I think it was the graphics card. A three year old, then state of the art, high end card. Well it has 64Mb of on board memory, no DVI or dual screen and it's..... well we'll just say, no longer state of the art:) Either which way, for seventy-five bucks (US) I picked another card up that's about four times the capability of the old card.

 

Important experienced note (FYI) from the experience.

 

Some might already know this, I had to figure it out the hard way.

 

The story, it seems the card would crash, blanking the screen, so I'd shut the machine off without a proper shut down cause I couldn't do a normal shut down; like I had a choice. I'd fire the puppy back up, do what ever and it'd crash again. The next time I'd fire it back up, corrupt or missing system files. So the helpful moral to the story, if you ever have a catastrophic shut down and you're able to fire the computer right back up, do so but then do an immediate "normal" shut down so as to purge all temp files and what ever else it is that XP does on a "normal" shut down. That way, should the system decide it wants to crash, you're doing a "clean" crash and burn as opposed to a "jumbled" or "dirty" crash and burn. XP seems to only deal well with "clean" crashes as opposed to "corrupt," "jumbled," or "dirty," crashes.

 

Now the rest of the story. My normal backup protocol is based upon mirroring two drives using Norton's "Ghost." So far so good but with the jumbled strings from the crashes, a chkdsk would clean things up only so far and the more I tried the worst it got. Greeeeeeeat! My saving grace, for data purposes was a third drive I had recently "Ghosted," not liked the results of and removed from the box and set on the shelf.

 

Currently, I'm coming to you live, via this third drive as the other two drives are too messed up other then the data on them which I can still see and transfer to this drive.

 

Why am I posting, I'm gambling that the system isn't going to trash itself between now and when I can get the system stabilized, drives reformatted and cloned.

 

Signing off:)

[beeman458]

Drives are reformatted and cloned.

 

Now we get to figure out why the CD-RW and DVD-RW +- don't like me:)

 

From there it's some sort of cross between a portable drive and a filed DVD data base for easy reference.

 

Thanks for all the helpful input and suggestions;

 

Due dilligence, multi-redundant backup and incremental archival re-recording with file indexing protocol onto new formats as they occur.

 

Got it! :)