And, as always, if you're archiving data to media... whether it's a jump
drive or CD-ROM, be sure to use a data validation tool, such as md5um,
to make sure the copy is valid before you try to use it down the road.
[md5sum generates a large number for your file, such as
> 0e6f8b4ceb78555201dfa7c4c983e213 example.txt
You can save this number in a file, such as "example.md5", save it to
the jump drive or CD-ROM, and then down the road you have md5sum
recalculate the file to see if it comes up with the original number...
even trivial changes in the file should cause the md5sum check to fail.
There are free versions of this tool available for just about every
software platform I know of.]
...brig
On Fri, 2004-12-03 at 14:48 -0600, Brisco, Shonda wrote:
> Okay, I'm having WAY too much fun with technology.
>
> Today I decided to do something unique and perhaps a little
> over-protective....I saved my entire library collection (about 20K
> titles) on my jump drive / flash drive (it's a 258MB flash drive and
> I used about 15MB of space). I'm hoping that things will never get to
> the point where I will need to rely on this to recover the collection,
> but even with our servers backing up what we have, there are times when
> I've had the technology report to me (usually several weeks later) that,
> "You know...we haven't been able to get a 'clean back-up' of the
> library's collection because of the amount of stuff on the servers. We
> should be able to get it backed-up once everyone cleans out their email
> space!"
>
> This means that (for oh, I don't know...two or three weeks) what I
> thought was being saved / backed-up for any future problems had not
> been! Any changes, updates or whatever I've done to the collection
> wasn't being saved!
>
> For those of you in smaller libraries, you may want to invest in a jump
> drive / flash drive to back-up things in your library, especially if
> you're not the one in charge of the server! I am not in charge of the
> server here and I don't know what things are being backed-up each night;
> however, with the track record that I've seen with my technology
> department / servers, I'm afraid that keeping an accurate account of
> what our collection contains (for future problems--fire, tornado, theft)
> may be better protected on this type of instrument than on disks or
> servers.
>
> Just an idea.
>
> ~Shonda Brisco
> Trinity Valley MS / US Librarian
> Fort Worth, TX
> briscos@trinityvalleyschool.org
>
>
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--
Brig C. McCoy 5109 Cherry St
Head, Systems Office Kansas City, MO 64110 USA
Linda Hall Library of Science, 816 926-8749 PHN, -8790 FAX
Engineering, and Technology <http://www.lindahall.org>
PGP Public Key: <http://www.theworld.com/~brigc/pgp/>
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