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Tuesday, June 24, 2008

DPP Solutions: Setting Up Redundant Storage

A look at the extensive possibilities of external hard drives as a digital photo archive

Western Digital My Book World Edition II

Networking
While connection, generally through Ethernet, will be too slow for typical image processing, a network of local group-access computers can share a server and multiple drives for spreading archival and backup solutions. Networked solutions are certainly more expensive, but offer the greatest freedom in terms of sharing images and information between numerous workstations, even ones throughout the world. The 2big Network two-disk RAID Gigabit Ethernet from LaCie offers image redundancy while also acting as a file-sharing backup or FTP server, enabling access of images and files through a network via FTP or a web browser.

While not a network drive, external drives like Western Digital's My Book World Edition II also offer remote access through storage systems. The proprietary WD Anywhere Access allows access even when the local computer is turned off. Externals are starting to offer many of the advantages that online storage used to have over localized storage, such as remote access.

“Remote access software is becoming very, very popular,” explains Scott Rader of Western Digital, “not just from the software standpoint, but also integrated within a hardware solution. As long as you're online and connected to the Internet, it will go out and make a peer-to-peer connection with the computer that you're sitting at to the drive back at the home or the office.”

Archival Advantage
Disk drives aren't a permanent archive. Ironically, the best long-term archival solution is to migrate files continually as needed. When capacity is fully reached on a drive, buy bigger and copy files to the next one. It's no problem except for the nominal cost, and it even gives you a chance to review long-forgotten images.