So I have 5 200 gig hard drives stuffed into the little box that is my computer, that’s basically a terabyte of total hard drive space

*if you ignore the 1024 bit nonsense and the fact that hard drive comes in a little less then they are sold as.

Yesterday I went to plunk the days photos from one of the new 6 gig micro drives (it with its three other identical bothers are newly part of our photographic arsenal) only to discover that I was out of space on my Raw 01 photo drive. No worries I have more then one of them (hence the 01 part of Raw 01) I should have no problem sticking half of this card on another drive till I get some sorting done…

Mmmmm. It says that I have 898 mb free on the Raw 02 Drive! Well there has to be some room on this other drive. Mmmm it would seem that there is in fact less room on that one… All said and told I had a grand total of 6 gig free on spread across all my 5 drives!

Mmmm… it would seem that I wasn’t so diligent in my back up and burning as I should have been. So today I started backing up a terabyte 4.3 gig at a time by taking a clean fresh DVD off the spindle, stickling it in the burner for 8 to 10 minutes, pulling it out, sullying the surface with one of the many colored sharpies in my deplorable penmanship, tossing it in the appropriate pile, and repeating the sequence. (For those that don’t know 1 TB = 1000 Gb roughly *see above) Everything else I did today was done in 8 min increments.

Even this blog entry was written in chunks with dvd switching in between. I did the rough math and at 8 min a DVD it would be somewhere around 26 hours straight to back up all the data here.

Tomorrow I am adding another 300gig drive and a hot swappable drive bay to the mess that is my computer. I am thinking I am going to retire the DVD system altogether and simply fill hard drives to capacity, remove, label, and then add a new one.

When exactly did DVD’s get to be the size of cd’s four years ago? I would really love to take that media tax that they stuck on all writable media, braid it into a proverbial piano wire and garrote the bastard that thought it up.