Howdy, folks.
So my wife had a near meltdown this weekend as her Firewire drive, where she stores all her iTunes (85GB at this point), seemed to crash. Not only that, she'd just purchased and downloaded an entire season of a favorite TV show and had not yet been able to sync her iPod. The drive had apparently been acting up for a few days, and suddenly would not mount and just sat with a rhythmic, pulsating sound as if it were trying to spindle up. She had been talking about backing up her iTunes library right before this happened.
I took it to my Mac to see if Disk Warrior could help, and as soon as I plugged it in I noticed a really nasty buzzing in the power supply... at the same, pulsating rate as the drive. I pulled a power supply from another drive (same make/model) and, behold, the drive mounted immediately. We're back to normal.
This got me thinking about backup options, since the failure of a Firewire drive after a few years is not a matter of if but when. She was talking about backing up to DVD-R. I contend that 85GB of iTunes media is going to be a real b**ch to burn to 4.7GB discs. Another Firewire drive is certainly an option, if it's used only as a backup storage and only plugged in every 4-6 weeks.
All that (sorry) to ask: would using a USB SD card reader/writer to dump the media to an archive on two or three SD cards be a viable alternative? I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't, but maybe there's something I'm missing. It seems like the perfect solution... which is what worries me. We just need cost effective storage that can be transferred back to an operating drive if necessary. Thoughts?
So my wife had a near meltdown this weekend as her Firewire drive, where she stores all her iTunes (85GB at this point), seemed to crash. Not only that, she'd just purchased and downloaded an entire season of a favorite TV show and had not yet been able to sync her iPod. The drive had apparently been acting up for a few days, and suddenly would not mount and just sat with a rhythmic, pulsating sound as if it were trying to spindle up. She had been talking about backing up her iTunes library right before this happened.
I took it to my Mac to see if Disk Warrior could help, and as soon as I plugged it in I noticed a really nasty buzzing in the power supply... at the same, pulsating rate as the drive. I pulled a power supply from another drive (same make/model) and, behold, the drive mounted immediately. We're back to normal.
This got me thinking about backup options, since the failure of a Firewire drive after a few years is not a matter of if but when. She was talking about backing up to DVD-R. I contend that 85GB of iTunes media is going to be a real b**ch to burn to 4.7GB discs. Another Firewire drive is certainly an option, if it's used only as a backup storage and only plugged in every 4-6 weeks.
All that (sorry) to ask: would using a USB SD card reader/writer to dump the media to an archive on two or three SD cards be a viable alternative? I can't think of any reason why it wouldn't, but maybe there's something I'm missing. It seems like the perfect solution... which is what worries me. We just need cost effective storage that can be transferred back to an operating drive if necessary. Thoughts?