I don’t really write much about geek toys, mostly because i’m really not that much into that anymore. The phase in my life where I was an early adopter is behind me, been there, done that, got all the discarded and dismantled electronic corpses to proof it. I just want things to work, work well, and not require hours of fiddling. A piece of electronics nowadays has a very short time in which to proof to me they will not be a hassle.

Lately I’ve gotten a new interest in geek toys. I can’t really explain why. I think it’s because I haven’t replaced any of my toys in years and I feel it’s time to welcome the next century. In the last few weeks I’ve bought a few new items that I thought would be interesting and I feel that’s not yet the end of it. Read on for my thoughts on these items.. More »

I’ve been really happy with my 1TB eSATA 2BIG drive from LaCie, so when I noticed they have a 2TB version I couldn’t resist buying it too. I’ll be using it to do all of our primary backups.

We use a 3 layer system for our digital assets (photo’s, music, video..).

1. Our originals are on a 1TB 2BIG eSATA drive. These are networked to several other machines in case we’re working on one of them.
2. I make automatic backups to a backup drive. As of today that’s a 2TB 2BIG eSATA drive. I also backup our music to this drive.
3. Once every month or so I make a backup of the backup and bring that to my office. This is to prevent loss due to theft or fire, the most likely causes of image loss.

The only thing that bugs me is that under Windows XP the access to these drives on a networked computer is really slow. I can make it a bit faster by assigning a drive letter on the networked machine but it’s still slow. On the main desktop though these disks are lightning fast!