Martyn Stewart wrote:
> A card with so much data still worries me and I've been using flash
> cards for a few years now I have also lost a great deal of info too,
> what I like to do is use something like 360 to 1gig in the field, I
> suppose its come from using Minidisk at 74 mins, if you loose 74 mins of
> recording it isn't so bad, I lost nearly 3 hours worth of what I call
> valuable information on a 1 gig Microdrive, you are also told that
> these are very durable!
> I like the convenience of the shorter capacity, it makes downloading too
> a cinch, its better to monitor an hour of recording as opposed to say, 4
> hours!
Speak for yourself on losing one Minidisc. I had that happen once in the
frog survey. Chris thought a minidisc laying on my desk was blank and
erased and recorded over it. Actually it had 12 site recordings on it, a
week's work. Annoying, but my fault for leaving it there next to a stack
of blank disks. Some data was never repeated.
Since then I've done my field stuff on HHb's disks and use Sony's for
music and such like. That way it's easy to tell which disks are not to
be erased.
Nothing is infallible. I expect there will be those who will have to
learn the hard way about putting all their eggs in one basket. For, if
you have that huge capacity, I guarantee that eventually you will have
it full of unbacked up stuff, just waiting to die.
In a the slower periods it can take me weeks to fill a survey disk.
That's a lot to loose, but a whole season's recording would fit on this
new stuff. That's a real disaster waiting to happen.
For a number of reasons I prefer to have relatively shorter capacity
media. Minidisc is a just fine size. I can handle the initial transfer
and editing in a evening easily.
On the same vein, how many have their only copy on their computer's hard
disk? Think about coming in tomorrow and the disk will only emit a high
pitched scream and not mount.
I do use solid state memory cards. For copies of data for my Palm. My
Palm is a fairly complete field kit of data on Georgia's frogs. None of
which is original, just copies.
Walt
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