SPINNING THE DISK!!

Some time ago I alluded to a technical problem I was having re data storage and archiving.
Discs break down,they go faulty,you have to pay data recovery guys a small fortune to recover your stuff.
but all is not lost when its lost!!
Number one there is data rescue iii.now thats good for starters!!
Then there is a hard drive docking station,an invaluable device which allows you to mount an internal hard disk as an external device.
If you are buying an external drive please buy a unit which has a single drive inside.
If this goes faulty its most likely going to be the interface thats fried ,so you can break the case open and pop it into your docking station.
If its a unit with more than one drive
your fried electronics are the glue that holds this together as one device on your desktop and you cant
recover the drive unless you buy the same controller circuit(messy)
Raids,multiple disc arrays,are all the rage right now but with the advent of solid state drives we will all be changing our storage over in the next few years.
So right now we need a cheap and safe way of storing our data until the time comes to migrate it to the next standard.
my solution is the following.

Use Adobe lightroom as your file management system.

Store your files in one location on your home computer(a second internal 1tb or 500gb disc)

As a further backup plan you could also use a program such as disk tracker to record the contents of your disks for lightroom independent search purposes.

When the disk is full remove it from your machine.

clone the removed disc using a device such as the Integral copy station box it and label it and place it on a shelf.(Storing the copy in a safe location)

Install a fresh empty disk Name it and start over again following the same process.

If you need to revisit your archive to access a file Lightroom will tell you what disk the the file is on.
you then simply mount that disc in your desktop dock and hey presto you have access!!

With a1tb drive costing something like €60 this form of data archiving is pretty cheap relative to external raid devices,or other Archiving methods like the drobo or gtech gspeed.

To soften the blow of this techie posting I have included a beautiful picture from 1996 shot in a Dublin national school.
Its a shot of a simpler time when all photographic images could be put in a little sleeve and housed in a book.Again it shows the bravery of children when confronted with the unknown(in this case me!!)

It was shot on film,neopan 400 rated at 800 and processed in microphen.

the camera was a mamiya RZ using a wide angle lens(me and the subject were at fairly close quarters)

oh happier simpler days!!

To all my friends wishing to join me in the type 55 project now is the time to make your choices of images and to mail me your low res versions so I can see if we have a show(my gut feeling is we will have two!!)
get me at dmon@me.com for this!!

I am back on the streets of Dublin next week for another Leaving dublin shot, so lets go!!
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