As lons as sony makes superior cameras you'll just have to cope with their memory card "standards". For example the new NEX-FS700 looks like to be way beyond anything else in it's price range. And panasonic with P2's has always been even worse. With SxS you can use SD in an adapter.
Agreed. Only a few years back they made good cameras, but way too overpriced. They are finally learning something.
What exactly is this failure point? 2 storages and 1 cable?
If the cable breakes, you replace it?
I think broken ssd is as likely inside ODD case than it is inside a laptop anyway.
HDD + SSD + ODD in the same box make 3 failure points. And only 1 cable understates there's some sort of chip inside that controls the switching between all three devices. If this chip fails, all data, from all drives, is inaccessible. That is in addition of individual HDD, SSD, ODD reliability. Plus, when so many devices are crammed inside the same enclosure by the same manufacturer, they tend to be lax on each one's quality. E.g., cell phones. Most of the time: crappy cameras, crappy batteries, slow media, slow computer sync, etc.
And if in 90s' you would have made 10 cd's a year, you'd have only 120 of them. If you don't have money to store data, then you just don't store it. If you live as nomad and can't carry your archive, then you just don't do it.
Nobody can solve these problems.
Having less possessions doesn't mean your data is less valuable than other's. Even with sufficient money, the question you must ask is "Is that data really WORTH that cost?", much the same way banks are not looking for best security, but just find the balance between expected theft cost and security cost. Only when the first is high they will implement better security. Much similar is the North American way of building doors and choosing locks: when theft risk is so low, what's the point in installing a steel-reinforced 3-locking points, Medeco-equipped door when you can buy a 5-pin deadbolt in any hardware store for 1/100th of the price?
Versioning isn't problem either. If you want to use it, you just buy a backup software that handles deduplicating. Software shouldn't mind what is your choise of media.
Except, these software don't seem to exist. Obviously a write-once media cannot be dealt with the same way as a read-write media can, and a very large media isn't handled the same way as multiple, smaller media. Also the reason why I don't backup documents that often changes to optical media, since I don't know how to manage them efficiently.
If you produce a lot of valuable data and want to archive it and use eg. 2 hours a month to back it up, is it really so hard to use one additional hour to refresh old back ups? Yes, that would mean 360 hours a decade, which sounds bad?
That doesn't sound too bad, of course. I'm being optimistic here, but the point is, it's essentially a manual process, hence, error-prone. Of course, that is only for ONE disc. If you have many of those, say, 10, which isn't big by anyone's standards nowadays, you're looking at 20 hours a month just to manage backups. That's a LOT of time, and the reason I kept on asking what strategies and software you and other forum-dwellers used to manage large backups without it getting unwieldly.
Data tape is the most used media in critical archiving and backupping in big business. If there would be better options they wouldn't use it. LTO and DLT has been backward compatible for decades and those tapes last for decades in proper enviroment.
So far, no one has been able to come up with definitive advantages of this rare and extremely expensive media. In home or small settings, you can't expect to readily access the necessary readers. Hence my comment why I don't find backup-ing to BluRay to be a good idea in 2012.
Maybe the easiest way is just let the Time Machine do it's job and when the hdd fills up, buy a bigger one. Then put the old one on the shelf and wait few years for optical or tape media ti get cheaper and then move data from hdd to tape or optical. Only problem with this is if the hdd currently in use, breaks up. So you need to have another hdd for redundancy.
I've been making low budget video projects, that I can't afford to fully back up with Time machine, so I have to do manual backups anyway. But maybe I'll start using Time machine for the rest...
In fact, I'm using a leaner approach. I assumed that the chances of having both internal HDD, TM HDD, SpiderOak and external FW800 drive for active projects fails at the same time in different places are practically nil. If one were to fail, I would replace it immediately. I wanted to buy a bigger TM drive, but so far, failed to see what would be the use in having more than 8 months of versioned backup. I'm more into redundancy. Admittedly, it has been only since I started working on my thesis I considered more serious backups than the occasional clone.
) But as I said, I'm not sure it's worth the time and effort to get them working again, or the money to find the right cables.
