Tera-Flop

How do you back up a terabyte of data? I’m finding out right now, the hard way…

Just before I went on vacation my LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme failed on me. It holds complete backups of both my desktop and laptop computers, plus all the media files for my many short films and videos. After a tedious week of troubleshooting I think I know what’s going on—the unit is actually four 250 gigabyte drives strung together, and one of those drives has bit the dust.

Now I make regular backups of my two Macs every month, but the capture files for a typical video project are much larger than even an 8.5 gigabyte dual-layer recordable DVD—which, BTW, go for about $10 each. Luckily, I’ve been able to make full-screen QuickTime copies of the finished projects, which is a good thing since I’ll have to erase the drive and send it in to LaCie for testing.

The lesson here? Back up everything!