Better saved than sorry

[roughly]

Nomi,Ya, I guess I should have included a link for the Terabyte "Thinger". We use the Buffalo Terastation Home Server. www.buffalotech.com. We started with a 1TB but then found a deal on 500G drives so swapped out the drives to make it a 2TB machine. That's the max of these at the moment. We got ours at Fry's, so if you have one around you it's definitely the best deal. There's also a company called Yellow Machine (the boxes are very cute and yellow). But it was more difficult to setup so I opted for the Buffalo when it went on sale. Let me know if you want more info on them. I could go on for days about these things but don't want to bore anyone It also seems that a lot of external drives and the Terastations come with backup software (or at least a demo of the software). You can set it to backup a specific folder every day at the same time. I think it will backup any new files so it's not just backing up the whole folder for hours. We've never tried any software, but it might be worth looking into.Theresa

[nomiyah]

Quote:Quote: Two is saving a session when you're done for the day. This is the area I need help on. I can burn it to a CD-Rewritable or DVD. Or use an external hard drive. I like the idea of storing online but not these giant audio files.I recommend an external (USB or FW) harddrive for this. It's cost effective, even gigantic drives can be had for around $100 these days, and perhaps even more importantly backups are really fast and painless, which means you'll actually DO them every day . With CDRW's and DVD's, it's always a bit of a hassle and I found myself postponing back-ups because of that. CDR's/DVDR's are good for archiving of course once the song is done.I agree and even though blank CDs are cheap in bulk, I don't like using them because it seems like a waste when you're saving something every day.

[nomiyah]

Quote:Nomi,Ya, I guess I should have included a link for the Terabyte "Thinger". We use the Buffalo Terastation Home Server. www.buffalotech.com. We started with a 1TB but then found a deal on 500G drives so swapped out the drives to make it a 2TB machine. That's the max of these at the moment. We got ours at Fry's, so if you have one around you it's definitely the best deal. There's also a company called Yellow Machine (the boxes are very cute and yellow). But it was more difficult to setup so I opted for the Buffalo when it went on sale. Let me know if you want more info on them. I could go on for days about these things but don't want to bore anyone It also seems that a lot of external drives and the Terastations come with backup software (or at least a demo of the software). You can set it to backup a specific folder every day at the same time. I think it will backup any new files so it's not just backing up the whole folder for hours. We've never tried any software, but it might be worth looking into.TheresaSure... go ahead and bore me, but make sure you dumb it down please since I'm not a techie. I don't understand how these thingy's differ from an external hard drive. I appreciate the comment about the equipment being cute, maybe it's a girl thing but so much equipment is downright ugly. Needless to say, not enough of a reason to get something.

[roughly]

Hi Nomi,Well, you asked for it, I'll do my best to not put you to sleep and keep out extreme techie jargon. Not that I'm that much of a computer person, but somehow I became the person to fix the 5 computers around here so I have a basic understanding at least.One of the biggest advantages to these boxes are that they can have a RAID between 4 drives. There are different types of raids, but in our case it is for making duplicates of the data. So if one of the 4 hard drives fails, the other three still have all of the data in tact. You simply replace the bad hard drive and you're safe again. If 2 hard drives go out, there's a good chance you're screwed, but it would be very rare for that to happen. Another advantage to these thingys are that you can link them to a UPS. So if your power goes out and your ups is working they will shut themselves off automatically to help protect your data. The last really big advantage is that they can hook up to your network without being linked to a computer directly. So you don't have to bog down any computer resources while backing up your data which can be nice if you have several computers on your network trying to access the backup location. If you only have one computer I guess it's not too big of a deal. Many of these thingys have a gigabit network too to help speed things up. (though the yellow machine did not have a gigabit network).Other features that you may or may not care about: Many of these have extra USB ports so if your computer is already full to the brim (like ours) not only are you not connecting another usb port to your computer, but you have more available to you. The Buffalo can be used as a printer server so you can plug your printer into it to help keep computer resources less bogged down (but I tried that recently with mixed results so opted to keep the printer on the computer, but maybe other people will know something I don't about that). Going back to the raid, you can set up the 4 drives in different configurations. The 3 main ones that you would use for this are (excuse the techie jargon here): JBOD: One enormous drive - so you could have a huge 2 terabyte drive to fill up.Raid 1: Data is striped exactly between the 2 drives. So you essentially cut the amount of space available to use in half because what writes to one drive, it also writes to a different drive. This is the most fail safe method.Raid 5: It somehow stripes between the 4 drives in a matter that makes the most efficient use of space but keeps all the data redundant so if one drive fails your still good.We use raid 5 and get 1.36 TB of usable space (after the reduncancy and file allocation stuff). For most people that is probably a lot of space, we tend to save a lot of different versions and have many tracks so our files get pretty big. So you would probably get by with a much smaller one. The downside of these are that they do take up more space than a single external drive. They also are mini computers themselves so they have a noisy fan and produce heat. And they are not very portable (compared to an external hard drive). I'm all for the good looking computer gear too It's starting to get better finally and there are some pretty kickin cases out there, but so much of it is still so boring. I have to admit that looks are a deciding factor in some computer gear for us (even my husband hates the beige computer look). It's something we have to see everyday for usually 12+ hours, so it may as well be pleasing and inspire creativity. Beige, silver and black seem to shout mediocrity, "Hey I want to fit in with everyone else" But maybe that's just me Okay, I'm sure you are probably asleep by now...I really did go on for a long time. Hopefully what I said made sense too and helps you in your decision. Theresa

[andreh]

Quote:One of the biggest advantages to these boxes are that they can have a RAID between 4 drives. TheresaA small addition to Theresa's extremely informative post - Wikipedia entry for the acronym RAID (originally "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks", now also known as "Redundant Array of Independent Disks"): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redundant_ ... disksAndre

[matto]

Quote:Beige, silver and black seem to shout mediocrityBoy I must be a really mediocre composer then, I've never owned anything other than beige, black or silver... Then again I don't look at the computer for 12 hours a day when composing....I look at what's ON the screen!

[nomiyah]

Teresa, I said dumb it down... whew, that was over my head. But I did get some of it. I also have large files. Thanks for the education, I'll study it.Matt, you're definitely a man. ... We ladies like to keep things pretty. Thanks for the discussion everyone.Nomi

[edteja]

Well Nomi, Tom Robbins painted his Selectric tyepwriter bright red so he could stand to work on it. So there is always the paint option. Of course he was only a guy.

[matto]

Quote:http://www.fendermail.com/pics/flowers.htmlOkay if they made computer cases that look like THAT I would be buying...

[roughly]

"Teresa, I said dumb it down... whew, that was over my head."Sorry about that...I just got going and couldnt stop.