A couple of months ago we installed a pogoplug unit, mainly to rationalise storage for our CD ripping services. This little device converts our many USB hard drives into shareable network attached storage (NAS). This has worked so well for backing up digital music files we've extended it to covering our image files.
The big differences between the two services are data volumes and client types. Ripping 1,000 CDs will create 100 Gbytes or more, while we can get 7,000 images onto a CD. We get work in from many clients per day for photo scanning, CD ripping is a much smaller number per month. However from time to time we have photo scanning clients who do generate large data files (one client last week had 300 35mm slides scanned into TIFFs, some 6 DVDs worth of data) and of course nobody wants their data to be lost.
So what we've done, and this may not be our final workflow, is to set up a folder on one Mac into which we drop copies of the image files just after we mail them back to clients. This rejoices in the ultra dull title of "Clients Out". I invested in a program called Chronsync which is a backup program. That monitors that folder and copies newly added sub-folders to a backup on a 1TB iOmega hard drive connected to our pogoplug. With minimal effort sent image files are now being backed up, and we all breathe an extra sigh of relief.
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