Tribblebytes Of Data

I have blogged before about my "out of control like jungle weeds" hard drive collection, which is perpetually bursting at the seams. My hard drives are like a herd of cattle out on a lush grassy plain, eating everything in site until they bust open messily and release copious amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Only in this case, it's not a smelly gas, it's my picture data.

So I have fought with different strategies to contain all of this precious data and keep it recently backed up (in the case of the pictures, two separate backups, one offsite in case of fire or art thieves). This has resulted in a wiry mess of different sized drives with colorful names. I just updated my list yesterday as we have a new computer coming soon and it will be filled with even more drives. I guess these drives are the modern equivalent of shoeboxes stuffed with photographs under the bed.

And I have a lot of shoeboxes:

Green Fairy 80GB MacBook Internal (User data, iPhoto database)
Orange Julius 200GB External (Lightroom catalog backups)
Blue Whale 300GB External (Music, Movies, Podcasts)
Black Hole 500GB External (Main photograph data)
White Dwarf 80GB Portable (Pictures from shoots - temp)
Purple Popsicle 1TB External (2x500GB concatenated set, Time Machine backups)
Aqua Wave 500GB External (Offsite pictures backup)
Red Dragon 500GB Mac Pro Internal (User data)
Grey Havens 2x160GB Mac Pro Internal striped RAID set (Photoshop scratch data)
Yellow Sun 1TB Mac Pro Internal (Future main photograph data)

I have some names saved up for future drives, but I'm open to suggestions.

So all this data uneasily co-exists on this haphazard flotilla of spinning platters. And despite the constant backups and built-in redundancies, I live in constant fear of that statistically inevitable day when the tribbles bust through the outer hull and data spills all over my desk.