Obscenity in digital storage space

I now have an obscene amount of digital storage. 

Due to the ever-increasing demands of the jurgen dot ca digital empire, I went out and bought myself another big hard drive. With this purchase, I’m now running Western Digital drives for all my external primary (non-backup) drives. This marks the end of the road for the last of my lousy Maxtor drives. Mark my words: I will never buy another Maxtor again. I’m surprised that the one I’m retiring today has lasted as long as it has. Of my three complete hard drive failures, all three have been Maxtors.

So, I counted my storage, and here’s what happens:

* 80gb Hitachi (Internal)

* 80gb Western Digital (Internal’s backup drive)

* 5gb ?? (first generation iPod)

* 20gb Hitachi (small portable file shuttle drive)

* 120gb Maxtor (Video drive. Die die die! Will probably end up being a scratch disk)

* 320gb Western Digital (Audio drive. Today’s new purchase)

* 200gb Western Digital (old Audio drive. Will be repurposed as a video disk)

* 250gb Western Digital (Audio’s backup drive, for a while)

* 1075gb (1.05tb!) Total I’ve broken the terabyte barrier.

Once the amount of data on the new 320gb gets too big to be backed up onto a 250gb disk, I’ll get another 320 and make the 250 the Video drive.

All this shovelling around of data and backups in general is made possible by Shirt Pocket Software’s excellent SuperDuper hard drive replication utility. I used to be too lazy to do backups, mostly because they were “too hard”. With SuperDuper, all I have to do is plug in a hard drive and click a button. It’s very very cool. And the best part is that if you’re cloning a startup disk, you can actually start up off it. Very handy if your main hard drive fails. Simply do a swap, and you’re in business right away, from your backup. SuperDuper saved my arse about a year ago, and I’ve been loyal ever since.

Right. So that was really incredibly geeky. Moving on to something more interesting soon. Thanks for the indulgence, gentle reader.