This is why permament storage is safer...

[Baltimore Shooter]

Than storing on a hard drive (like you'd have to do w/ P2). This guy almost lost everything. Infact, Retirement Living TV alomst lost all of their stories when their SAN crashed. They had to go back to the archive to re-enter everything.

Problem:
Situation: I have a 2 year old SmartDisk Firelite external firewire hard drive (http://www.smartdisk.com/staticpages/fireliteporthdd.asp) that has worked flawlessly until... About a week ago, it mounted onto my MacBook (running OS 10.4.11), let me put files onto it, and eject it. I took it to my tower G5 (running 10.4.11), plugged it in, and... nothing. The light came on and the disk spun up - indicating there was power going to the drive, but it would not mount. Then it wouldn't mount on the laptop anymore...

Research: Looking into this for the past few days, I've found a handful of forums that mention this problem (http://forums.macosxhints.com/archive/index.php/t-30296.html ). But, most importantly, I found a firmware update from SmartDisk that can be applied that apparently makes the disk work with 10.4 (http://sdkbase.smartdisk.com/display/2n/index.asp?c=&cpc=&cid=&r=0.1323511 ). BUT - you have to mount the drive on a computer running 10.3.6 or earlier and apply it from there. (So, obviously I can't run it from either of my systems!)

Help: SO... I guess what I'm wondering is if anyone has a suggestion as to how I can make this happen? Does anyone happen to be running 10.3.6 or earlier and wouldn't mind me applying this firmware update from your machine? Or, does anyone have any suggestions as to where to go to find it... maybe the Apple store runs past OS versions for this reason? At this point I'm even willing to pay to fix it somehow, I just want my beloved drive back!!

Possible solution
Not sure if this is what you need but you could try TestDisk.

http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

Has a Mac OS version. Worked for me when an external hard drive I had would not mount due to boot/filesystem error for improper ejection. Ultimately could not repair the boot info but was able to easily and quickly copy everything off of it, then just reformatted with Disk Utility and copied everything back on.
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Seem to me XDCam-HD is a better format for archiving than a hard drive or archiving back to tape.

Warren

 

[Focus Finder]

we drop everyting back to tape, yes its a pain in the ass but tape is cheap and more reliable than hd's. ever seen hd's loose sectors happens all the time and sometimes one sector can kill half your drive. but more important with mass storage comes raid-s well i ahve seen on two occasions the raid drives die, they lost there striping. that means even if you were running a raid-5 it was useless lucky both times we were able to send off the drives and 3 days later got them back and didnt loose anything but still. drop it to tape those external hds are cheap for a reason and its not because they are reliable.

 

[theintern]

What about magnetic tape backup?

Our station is in the midst of upgrading, we'll be tapeless, and we are exploring options for archiving. It looks like the route we may go is the tape backup drives that most of the IT world has been using for years. So kind of a mix between tape and hard drive in the sense that the digital files will be stored on the tape.

Is anyone using a method like this?... thoughts?

please PM me if you currently use something like this, I would love to ask some more detailed questions.

 

[rexreed]

There really is nothing absolutely permanent is there? Most stations using p2 are not trying to archive on a p2 card. There are lots of other ways... but p2makes a lot of sense to the legions of stations using it right now. Maybe not the best thing for freelancers, but hardly the bust that warren would make it to be.