opethfan , flash memory is amazingly durable but it can have its bad moments, from personal experience. I ve had one corrupt on me some years ago, for no reason.* *there's always a reason, but none that I could explain.
This is somewhat ironic now that I'm trying to get my dad to scan our thousands of slides that have my childhood on them. If I did backup all my big ass pictures to slides, and wanted to get them back on the computer (or print them) what type of quality/resolution are we looking at then? I realize they are a negative of sorts, but I assume there's some type of limitation. Yeah, this is what I'm hoping for. I don't mind paying $100 (even $200) a year for offsite storage, but Amazon's current plans will get pricey. My son is 2 months old, and we take an obscene amount of pictures. My wife won't let me delete any of them...even the small ones. To boot, I take them in JPG and RAW, so we're looking at 8MB per picture... and I suck, so I take a lot. W/ Amazon's S3 or whatever it is, I'd be spending $50/month relatively soon. For now I have a 300Gb drive in my Linux box doing very little. Will probably use that, and buy some sick 750Gb drive for my emulation machine and stash my shit on there too for safe keeping. Doesn't work when the house burns down, or is crushed in an Earthquake, but I'll have bigger problems then.
there's an application called Gmail Drive, which makes your GMAIL account appear as a drive in My Computer. Problem is though, that attachment sizes are limited , so last time I checked, you couldn't transfer anything bigger than 10MBs at a time.
Also, although unlikely, Gmail is a beta project and could go down at any time without warning and data storage is not guaranteed.
Ahem I don't think Gmail is going down any time soon, to be honest. There's a genuine question as to whether or not Google would delete accounts that they felt were abusing their service, but I think it'd have to be reaching epidemic proportions before that happened. Last I checked the 10MB limit was still in place, which in turn limits the usefulness for most people, as most people don't know how to compress their files into 10MB segments/can't be bothered.
bump: got the 220GBP-worth 20GB travan USB 2.0 drive for a fraction of the price. I ll post impressions as soon as I can
Are data tapes damaged by X-rays? I just wondered on this considering you travel back and forth from Greece. Presumably they still X-ray your luggage at the airport.
I believe that they may be sufficiently protected by x-rays. Even floppy disks and Audio cassettes passing X-rays survive, and floppies are known to be quite fragile
Your primary concern should be a GOOD BACKUP REGIME!! No mqatter what media you use, back up REGULARLY! If you keep moaning about how much time it takes, and allow more files on your PC, it will take longer and longer! Even if you only use CD-R to backup, do it regularly. Realise when you have 700mb worth of data to burn, and do it! Still, if you're worried about time etc. then a tape drive is the answer. Whack a tape in, set up ms backup (or whatever) for automated weekly backups, and off it'll go on its own accord. As for hardware longevity, the crucual thing is heat. DO NOT LET THEM GET HOT! Have a decent casae with a front fan that blows back across the hard drives. Keep space between drives - don't mount them in adjacent bays. This practice should keep them below 35 degrees Celcius. Anything above that, and they'll wear out more rapidly. Naturally, make sure they aren't susceptible to shock, either! Don't EVER hit your PC in a fit of rage! I've seen the consequences all too many times! As for the X-Ray thing: X-Rays are radiation. Tapes are magnetic. Magnets will kill tapes (tell airport staff you are carrying tapes - some of their equipment may be harmful to them), but X-Rays should be OK, in theory. Laptops have to go through the metal detectors, and indeed you have to take them out of their bags and put them in their own tray. Neither my internal nor external hard drive were affected by a flight in and out of the country.
