The terror bites….

We were happy to receive our new 18 terabytes of hard drive space, for storing and backing up video recordings of sign language, performance and interpretations of this material. Thankfully we had Ben Foley arrive just at the right time, to design a backup strategy. This is essential, especially when there are multiple participants and sites where work is happening. Our storage and backup strategy identifies 4 tiers of data transfer – mobile devices, to working drives, to backup drives, and then the safety  backup drives. It also has to coordinate work done in Melbourne, Queensland and Alice Springs, and this involves using a cloud server to share new and updated files. We are using a useful little tool called arRsync (http://arrsync.sourceforge.net/), which automates syncing between drives. This program allows us to enter presets, so that the syncing happens in a smooth unidirectional flow between these drives every time we come back to base with fresh data.There’s also a little app that scans your drives and creates a basic library of contents: (http://diskcatalogmaker.com), which helps to keep an eye on where everything is.