Okay, another question: One of things that I plan to do is use SuperDuper to run a nightly back up from one of the new (yet to be determined) 500GB drives to the other. Running scheduled back ups will ensure I actually do routine back ups.
I'm leaning toward the Venus 4 bay enclosure. However, I'm just realizing this would need to run 100% of the time for the back up to run. Does the fan power down when not needed, or would it just be running all of the time. I know I would not win points at home if in the home office I have a device with a fan running 24/7.
I've received a lot of great feedback on HD enclosures, etc in this forum and another. However, as I price these things out, I'm not sure that I actually save any money; am I sacrificing the reliability of external drives that have been carefully built by some (not all of the manufacturers). I'm looking at the Lacie D2 drives; are these more reliable than the bricks that have gotten such a bad wrap?
I like the idea of the 4 bay drives...but then I can't seem to find a reasonably price FW version. esata simply requires another card AND connection to my MBP. Daisy chaining FW devices together is nice.
Other thoughts? Maybe there is not ideal ($450) solution to get 2 500-750GB firewire drives?
Tim Carpenter wrote:
I've received a lot of great feedback on HD enclosures, etc in this forum and another. However, as I price these things out, I'm not sure that I actually save any money; am I sacrificing the reliability of external drives that have been carefully built by some (not all of the manufacturers). I'm looking at the Lacie D2 drives; are these more reliable than the bricks that have gotten such a bad wrap?
I like the idea of the 4 bay drives...but then I can't seem to find a reasonably price FW version. esata simply requires another card AND connection to my MBP. Daisy chaining FW devices together is nice.
Other thoughts? Maybe there is not ideal ($450) solution to get 2 500-750GB firewire drives?...Show more →
We use MyBook's at work. We've had very good luck with them in the short turn but you're still (IMHO) risking your data.
The Lacie's .... not so much. Nearly every unit has failed and required chkdisk/ SpinRite to be recovered, and a good 50% are sitting disassembled as we had to pull the drives out in order to try and recover them.
A solution that works for me (http://www.overclockers.com/articles1466/) and doesn't put additional wear/and tear on the drives is to get an internal bay that accepts 'naked' SATA drives. You insert the sata drive, close the bay- it spins up- and then you run your backup program to copy the data to it. A 750gb WD AAKS (high speed, high reliability) drive is 155$ right now at NewEgg. Get a couple of them and you can rotate them on a weekly/nightly rate, removing the drives and swapping them in and out for your incremental backups. Keep them in their static bags and you don't even have to touch anything other than the aluminum casing.
purduephotog wrote:
A solution that works for me (http://www.overclockers.com/articles1466/) and doesn't put additional wear/and tear on the drives is to get an internal bay that accepts 'naked' SATA drives. You insert the sata drive, close the bay- it spins up- and then you run your backup program to copy the data to it. A 750gb WD AAKS (high speed, high reliability) drive is 155$ right now at NewEgg. Get a couple of them and you can rotate them on a weekly/nightly rate, removing the drives and swapping them in and out for your incremental backups. Keep them in their static bags and you don't even have to touch anything other than the aluminum casing. ...Show more →
I can only use this with an external drive bay on a tower of some sort, right? Are you suggesting that I can some how integrate this with some other case to connect to my Macbook Pro?
Well you could put the drive bay into an external case, and then just slip the drives in and out. It'll cut down on your cost of carriers.
See I've moved (and am trying to convince other people too) to move from tapes to hard disks- they're non-linear accessible, they're FAST, and best of all- they're CHEAP. One inconvenient cost is the carrier- you have to have something to hold the drive as you insert it into a bay and that can add cost significantly to the overall backup price.
Unless you get a 'naked' drive carrier like the one I listed in my article- then you just push in the sata drive and copy the data to it.
So you could put that in an eSATA case (assuming you have eSATA on your macbook) and backup your data in that manner. If you don't have eSATA then I understand why you want firewire, but having used firewire (I have 6x controllers for external bays here) I would dissuade you from it- it's not a 'secure' system and can sometimes corrupt data without you knowing it.
I'm sure you've been over this before but just how much data do you need to reliably back up every evening- and how much of that changes on a regular basis?
purduephotog wrote:
See I've moved (and am trying to convince other people too) to move from tapes to hard disks- they're non-linear accessible, they're FAST, and best of all- they're CHEAP.
...
I'm sure you've been over this before but just how much data do you need to reliably back up every evening- and how much of that changes on a regular basis?
Would you mind describing your backup details - what you backup, how much data, how long, and what you aim to protect against.
This approach is intriguing to me, but I wonder if I should just buy an external multi-bay case (been looking at the AMS cases) and run with that. I will be using an esata express 34 card with my macbook pro. One requirement is that I prefer to have a port multiplier so that I have one connection to my laptop.
My back up needs/desired process is this.
On the laptop, I keep my working files (160GB HD); back that up daily to one drive. My photo archive would sit on one of the external 500GB hard drives (right now I have 250Gigs of archive photos...some of that I will be working through to toss images that I should never have saved in teh first place..all originals shot on a project). I would run a back up to a second 500GB drive. I would run that back up only when I have made changes somehow to the current archive (a couple of times/week). At somepoint, i want to be taking a back up drive off site...just in case the worst happens and my house burns down.
I'm developing my photography biz in addition to my day job. Right now we're not talking about GIGS of data every week (hopefully that will change).
