Month: July 2006

Maps of Religious Belief/Membership in United States

As part of his American Ethnic Geography courser, Valparaiso professor Jon Kilpinen has posted a gallery of maps that show how religious belief/church membership is distributed across the United States. The data is taken from the Glenmary Research Center’s Religious Congregations and Membership in the United States, 2000.

Firefox Extended Statusbar Add-On

Back when FireFox 1.0 was release I complained that the developers had eliminated one of my favorite features — statistics in the status bar that would tell you, among other things, how long it took for the page you were visiting to load. It was removed supposedly because normal users don’t care about that sort of thing, but more likely the developers didn’t want users citing the numbers as proof that Firebird/Firefox was slower than IE.

Anyway, there is an extension for Firefox, Extended Statusbar, which displays a number of statistics in the statusbar including load time, total bytes downloaded, number of images loaded, etc.

Backing Up and Managing Very Large Amounts of Data

The other day I read Mark Pilgrim’s look at the problems with backing up large amounts of data. Mark wrote,

But it’s not enough. I’m creating a lot of data, and I want to keep most of it for the rest of my life. This includes video of my children growing up, but also things like video footage of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. In 2004, I generated 35 GB of such data. In 2005, I generated just shy of 150 GB. This year I’m on track to generate about 100 GB. I foresee doing this for about 20 more years, and then maintaining the archive for another 30 years after that. After that I’ll be dead and it will be Somebody Else’s Problem.

I don’t know how to back up 100 GB of video.

. . .

How do you back up 100 GB of data per year for 50 years? Or even 10 years?

I can sort of understand where Pilgrim is coming from, though at the moment I wish my backup problem was that simple. Currently I am generating about 150gb of data every week. How do you backup and manage 7.8 terabytes of data every year? Especially assuming that given the pace of things, that could be 15 terabytes/year within 5 years?

Looking at PriceWatch, a terabyte worth of SATA hard drives costs about $410. So 8 terabytes worth is just shy of $3,000 at the moment.

Currently the way I manage such large data is simply to archive it to DVD. Obviously that’s a temporary solution that I would not rely on for more than 2-3 years. Of course in 2-3 years, a) higher volume optical media (Blu-Ray/HD-DVD) should be cheaper, allowing me to cut down on the thousands of DVDs I’m currently storing, and b) the cost per terabyte of HD space will eventually fall below the current cost per terabyte of optical storage (DVD storage costs roughly $69/terabyte for the physical media).