David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Our annual departmental meeting was held this year at the former corporate headquarters of Schering-Plough. While wandering around in the nearly deserted building during a break, I came upon this bronze statue by Fredric Remington in the executive suite.
I saw a report on the news today that the conference center at the Catholic retreat at Saint Malo behind the Saint Catherine Chapel on Rt 7 in Colorado near Rocky Mountain National Park burned down today. Apparently, the fire did not impact the chapel. It is a great photo location, with Mt Meeker in the background. In most of my images at this location, I used the chapel to hide the conference center. This image is from December 2007, not today. I also saw a weather report that the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains had a significant wind storm, with winds up to 90 mph. I assume the high winds impacted the fire.
I’d previously posted that it was taking a long time for my Drobo B800i storage device to update after adding two additional 3 TB drives. The update never completed (after 12+ days), and appeared to need to restart after the multiple power failure after the early snow storm (and ultimately 42 hours of outage). I finally gave up, and decided to reset the device and restore my image database from backups. For the most part this went well, just took time. However, one of my primary backup devices, a Western Digital 2 TB MyBook devices failed. During the restore process, the process stalled. At first, I thought it was an overheating problem, so let the device cool before restarting. This was repeated several times. I even used the Western Digital “Data Lifeguard” program to check the device – and the device passed with no errors. Ultimately, I got a message that I needed to format the device before I could use it. OUCH!!!
OK — no problem, I have other backups. I went to the other backup that I keep in the house, the original RAW files stored on Western Digital Passport drives. These were my original external storage devices (160 GB, 240 GB, 500 GB, 750 GB, 1 TB) that I used since I started getting into digital photography. Unfortunately, one of the drives containing the data lost on the MyBook device was not recognized. STARTING TO PANIC!! — this included images from ANPAT 9 including image from a once in a lifetime trip to Alaska.
I guess that I am paranoid about data storage. I keep three, and sometimes four backups of key data, and some of the data is stored off-site (away from home). The third backup, I keep at work. I went and picked it up this weekend (3 hour round trip) and I was able to restore the data to my primary Drobo device. I am still running a full comparison (using Program Match — 32 bit CRC mode) since some of the earlier data restored from the failed drive may have been corrupted.
The thing that I did loose was any current metadata, or processing data for the images since I was going back to the original RAW files saved from the camera.
Bottom Line — One backup is not enough!! Primary media can fail, backup media can fail (hard drives fail). Primary media can be lost (fire, theft, other disasters etc). Technology moves forward, and old backup devices become obsolete. I am currently dealing with nearly 500 K (7 TB) images, and need to future proof my storage and back-up work-flow. Need to keep all of this in focus when devising a backup storage protocol.
I plan to get back to reviewing and processing images soon, so I can share images again!!
It was clear and I had several cameras out capturing the night sky. I used the images to create a time-lapse video.
The sky was clear so I took my telescope out. First to see the big sunspot (AR 1339), and then later the waxing gibbous moon. The Questar telescope comes with a solar filter to safely view the sun and sunspots.
