Archiving and Photos

I’m way behind on posting; I wanted to throw some stuff here when I am waiting for something to compile.

Rsnapshot, a backup utility using rsync. Mike Rubel has written an article about backups with rsync/linux. Here’s a slashdot discussion about digital rot, a very serious problem. I found (and copied about 8-10 pages) of notes about how to implement a backup solution.

I’m starting to consider this question, and my answer:
1) use a fireproof safe, (plan to buy sometime soon).
2)two hosting sites. with rsyc(This redundancy also helps with downtime, but does it save time or require more maintenance time?).
3)USB hard drives. 100 gigs are about $175. (That raises the question of whether I should use an inefficient but agnostic file system like FAT32 or a better journaling file system like reiserfs.
4)portable media devices. My mp3 player/recorder has really simplified the mp3 storage problem.
5)online digital photo hosting. I’m going to start an account with flickr , and although I still have some reservations , they are probably problems I don’t need to worry about now. BTW, for the curious, here’s my photo homepage on flickr. I easily expect to have over a thousand photos uploaded in a few weeks there, so stay tuned.

For a while, I seriously played with the idea of storing photos on zope/plone, but the big problem is keeping it on the file system rather than in the ZODB and having a quick and easy way to extract metadata from the images (I need to look into getting Webdav access; that is becoming an issue now with the possibility of uploading mp3’s and dozens of files into zope at once.

Digikam is a functional linux based photo management system. (But alas, no windows-client).

Speaking of offsite hosting, zettai offers $40 hosting, which gives you one zope instance and 2 gigs of data, and apparently no php (and perhaps not even a sysadmin management tool like webmin). I’m actually tempted by this for my literary site, but without enough space to use the service also as a secondary backup, I’m not sure the price is worth it.