Organising your ebooks

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by pwalker8

Among those who are fanatical about such things (professional photographers for example), it's the norm to first back up to a raid disk, then back up to media such dvd or usb drive and then back up to an off site storage (there are a number around). I back my calibre directory on to a raid disk and my laptop so I have three copies. I also have all my books on my reading devices (a couple of iPads).

I honestly don't think that RAID is any "safer" than a normal disk. A few years ago I had a RAID 5 Buffalo NAS. The RAID controller failed and fried 3 of the four disks in the RAID array, meaning that had I not had (which obviously I did have!) a backup, I would have lost my data.

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I honestly don't think that RAID is any "safer" than a normal disk. A few years ago I had a RAID 5 Buffalo NAS. The RAID controller failed and fried 3 of the four disks in the RAID array, meaning that had I not had (which obviously I did have!) a backup, I would have lost my data.

The presumption is that rotating media is more likely to fail than the solid state electronics. Which may be statistically true but no comfort to those getting the short end of the MTBF curve.

(Or a lightning strike, for that matter.)

RAID is really intended for heavy workloads where the mechanical components are the biggest risk factor.

For data backup purposes (i.e., low duty cycles) a better use of funds is multiple standalone drives scattered at off-site locations.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I honestly don't think that RAID is any "safer" than a normal disk. A few years ago I had a RAID 5 Buffalo NAS. The RAID controller failed and fried 3 of the four disks in the RAID array, meaning that had I not had (which obviously I did have!) a backup, I would have lost my data.

You think correctly; it isn't. RAID (any form of it, such as 1 and 5) is not a backup. It is just a safeguard, providing you a chance, but not a guarantee, that you don't need to pull out your backup. Obviously, replacing a drive and rebuilding the array is much faster than copying back a huge multi-terabyte backup.

A RAID0 array, striping data over multiple disks, so read/write can use more than one disk at once, is actually built for speed, not for safety. If one disk in a RAID0 array fails, everything is gone.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

I would retain a local copy also, if I were you. Dropbox wants to own your files, and they have been known to cancel accounts containing e-books.

To be honest, I would never trust a cloud service as my main storage.

Dropbox was only canceling accounts of those who made their opds catalog public and had copyrighted books. I don't remember if they only canceled if the drm was stripped. If your opds catalog is private you have nothing to worry about.

[Jack Torrance]

I started migrating it all to MS OneDrive. 30gb for free is more than enough at least for the time being for all my books and probably all my pictures once I get them organised enough to save.

I'll save my iCloud storage for the stuff that floats on the iphone and iPad just in case they crash or get broken.

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by Purple Lady

Dropbox was only canceling accounts of those who made their opds catalog public and had copyrighted books. I don't remember if they only canceled if the drm was stripped. If your opds catalog is private you have nothing to worry about.

Except if you do 'something' (whatever it is) of which Dropbox disapproves, of course. It's the same with Steam. All your games are in there, and you have nothing to worry about, until Steam 'thinks' you are cheating in online multiplayer, or do anything else they don't like. Then you'll lose access to your account and all of your games.

Never trust any online service as primary storage and never trust a company to manage your digital assets for you, I say.

[Ripplinger]

Years ago when I first considered a RAID setup and read about what happens when even a part of it failed, I decided like HarryT that it just wasn't reliable. Since I was ready to get 2 drives anyway for the RAID, I decided to still get them but use them as 2 separate drives. The 2nd drive is a full cloned backup of the main drive, which means if the main drive goes belly-up for whatever reason (virus, bad software installation that just doesn't play nice, drive actually dies), all I have to do is swap which drive I boot up to at startup and I've got my computer back in a few minutes. I have a nightly file sync that is done to copy any changed files, such as my photos, ebooks, all documents, bookmarks, anything subject to a lot of changes. The only thing I might miss are newly changed or created documents for the day, and there's usually always a way to get those back, and possibly program updates depending on how long ago I did the last cloning.

If the main drive turns out to be dead, I just buy a new drive at that point and clone the 2nd drive back to the main drive and fully back in business without any down time. Cloning takes less than 3 hrs on a 2 TB drive and I usually do it while I sleep, maybe once every 3-6 months. If it was just a software glitch or a virus (although I've never once had a virus and my first computer was in 1984), I still just clone the 2nd drive back to the main drive, change boot order and all is back again.

The nightly backup also make copies of files that change often to a 2nd PC, which also has the same 2 drive setup.

I've never lost any data since doing this over 20 years now. It's a system I'll probably always keep until something more reliable, as easy, and as cost efficient comes along.

[Purple Lady]

Originally Posted by Katsunami

Except if you do 'something' (whatever it is) of which Dropbox disapproves, of course. It's the same with Steam. All your games are in there, and you have nothing to worry about, until Steam 'thinks' you are cheating in online multiplayer, or do anything else they don't like. Then you'll lose access to your account and all of your games.

Never trust any online service as primary storage and never trust a company to manage your digital assets for you, I say.

I agree you don't know when or if they might disapprove of what you are doing. I just remember when it first came out that Dropbox was canceling people's accounts there was an uproar, but it turned out the only ones canceled at that time were those who were sharing books with a public folder.

[pwalker8]

Originally Posted by HarryT

I honestly don't think that RAID is any "safer" than a normal disk. A few years ago I had a RAID 5 Buffalo NAS. The RAID controller failed and fried 3 of the four disks in the RAID array, meaning that had I not had (which obviously I did have!) a backup, I would have lost my data.

All I can say is that I've had disk drives fail in my Drobo and all I had to do is replace the failed disk. No data lost. Much better than a single external drive. Obviously, any single device can have a major failure, be it failed controller or lightning strike. The real safety is in having multiple copies in multiple places. However, a raid 5 device like the drobo is much safer than a normal disk, given that the most common point of failure is the spinning disk drive.