I don't like whiners, so I wasn't going to describe our hardware troubles in August. But then I realized that some people might learn from our lesson of how paranoia can prevent the tragedy of losing your photographs forever, so I've included this report.

Our second August adventure was a classic dramatic conflict: Man vs. Technology. We're completely digital here at Luvbight.COM...our photos and videos are shot using digital technology, our images and movies are processed and edited by computers and stored on CD's, DVD's and magnetic hard drives.

Our most important rule is the three copy rule: no file or image is deleted before there are at least three other copies. The second rule is geographic diversity...at least one copy is kept away from home, or when travelling at least one copy is in a different bag from the others.

The first copy is the image on a Compact Flash card in the camera. As soon as possible (and definitely within 24 hours), the card is downloaded to the computer hard drive (the second copy). The card isn't erased, but the downloaded files are moved to another directory on the card to show that they've been copied to the computer. There are now two copies of each image.

When travelling, the computer hard drive is backed up to a portable firewire drive or iPod (the third copy). At home, the computer is backed up to a large external hard drive (also a third copy). About once a month, and especially before a major trip, the big external hard drive is put into a water-tight plastic bag and stored in a safety deposit box at a local bank (our off-site copy). We actually have two big drives, and we swap them once a month...when one is the home copy, the other is the off-site copy.

Until there are three other copies of a photo, we don't erase our CF cards.

Sounds paranoid, doesn't it?

Not when you consider that disk drives fail...it's not if, but when. In August, our "at-home" big disk failed. No problem, we had the copies on my laptop and the copies in the safety deposit box. But before a replacement drive could be shipped and rebuilt, my laptop drive also failed. That's when the paranoia paid off...we still had the third copies of everything.

By the first week of September, we had a brand new one terabyte RAID 5+1 system storing all the photos and videos, and DVD backups of all the photos burned. In case you wondered, RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Independent Disks". What it means for us is that we have four half-terabyte disk drives. Three of the four hold the files, and the fourth is a "hot spare", ready to be used if one of the other three drives fails. The three main disks each hold two-thirds of the data, so that if any of them fail, the other two disks have all the information, and the spare disk is rebuilt so that it becomes the "third" disk.

And note that we still keep copies in the safe deposit box, just in case the house burns down.

To add insult to injury, when the new RAID arrived, one of the four disks was bad "out of the box", so we had to wait a couple of days for a replacement to arrive from the factory.

So if you wondered why I wasn't writing journal entries, it's because I was fighting multiple disk failures. Only an extreme sense of paranoia and a conservative backup strategy prevented tragedy.