External HDD for backup (OS-X)

[wclark5179]

The biggest ingredient I see is irrelevant redundancy relative to backups of digital files as, I've found, over the years, very few request a copy of a digital file and I haven't encountered corrupted digital files on my XT HD's.. As for making copies of your art for posterity, I recommend making prints that people can view with their eyes several hundred years from now.

I haven't had a HD die just yet and I suppose I'm due but when that happens I have several backups that, I hope, one will work for bringing up some clients request for a photograph from the past.

My recommendation, careful care of your existing files on existing drives should be a source of recall later, many years/decades from now.

I've got negatives from the 1950's and forward in time, one copy and I haven't been skunked yet.

Here are my current external drives I use for images:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/produc...ential_SE.html

Good luck.

[Aksana3D]

Maybe this article will be useful: https://hetmanrecovery.com/recovery_...-your-data.htm

[Light Guru]

Maybe this article will be useful: https://hetmanrecovery.com/recovery_...-your-data.htm

FYI this thread is 4.5 years old. No need to dig up old dead posts.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Leigh]

No need to dig up old dead posts.

Sez who?

I'm using a very similar RAID1 configuration with 2x2TB hard drives on this computer.

It is certainly best practice in the modern day.

- Leigh

[Corran]

RAID is dead, JBOD with a dedicated OS infrastructure like unRAID is better and easier for most individual uses - same concept with a parity disk but easier to setup/maintain. My 10TB server has been running flawlessly for about two years now. One could setup a JBOD server with random HDDs laying around for practically free.

[Jim Andrada]

Hadn't looked seriously at unRAID before - thanks for the link. I did find the following from their website somewhat amusing:

Virtualization technology has advanced much since it was first introduced

Considering that it's just about 50-years/half-a-century since IBM shipped a commercial Virtual Machine system I would certainly think that the technology might have advanced a bit.

[Sasquatchian]

Personally, I like having an external drive bay from OWC that you can plug in any bare drive when you need it. It's a great tool for drive swaps and general diagnosis when needed. I have had the internal drives on both of my MBP's go south within the last few months, with the second one only being last week. I keep a Time Machine backup on both, and in the case of the recent drive going bad - and I heartily recommend Tech Tool Pro, Disk Warrior and Cocktail in addition to Disk Utility - I did a complete Time Machine backup as TTP told me that the drive was in the process of failing. I ordered a new 1 TB drive from OWC for $70, put that in the external bay, and then used Time Machine's Restore From Time Machine Backup to restore the most recent TM backup to the new drive. After formatting, it took about three hours and I had a complete copy of my old drive on the new one. Booted up off the new one while still in the external bay just to make sure it was working then shut it all down and swapped out the drives.

You can use CCC, Super Duper, TTP or even Disk Utility to make a clone of your drive, but in my case, that operation failed - maybe because the drive was already failing, but in any case it was great to know that the Time Machine route worked flawlessly. And in the case of this particular laptop, because it's used to run Extensis Portfolio, which will not run on anything later than 10.9.5, I couldn't just install a new OS on the new drive and migrate everything over, which is what I did a few months ago.

One final note on aging MacBook Pro's. A known weak link is the very delicate ribbon cable that attaches to the internal drive. I had one of those fail on the night of an exhibit opening I was having and it looked initially like the drive had failed catastrophically. That was an area where that external bay came in handy. Took that internal drive out, put in the the external bay and booted from the Disk Warrior bootable thumb drive and the once internal drive showed up just fine. Then booted up from that same now external drive and it was fine. All arrows pointed at the cable, which was confirmed at the Apple Store where they replaced it for free even though it was long out of warranty. That part is under fifty bucks, so not a bad idea to have one on hand just in case.

[Greg]

Have had several HDs of various makes (Lacie, WD, etc.) die over the years. On the advice of a videographer professor, I now use 2 separate large OWC HDs. Each year the older one is retired and replaced by a newer one. Past year's worth of images files saved on Gold DVDs every first week in January (when it's cold up here in New England and staying inside no problem during a snow storm) and desktop entirely cleaned up. Image files that I am ongoing working on are stored on my iMac's desktop and also on an orange Lacie Rugged portable USB3 HD which is also gone over every first week in january.

[jp]

Hadn't looked seriously at unRAID before - thanks for the link. I did find the following from their website somewhat amusing:

Virtualization technology has advanced much since it was first introduced

Considering that it's just about 50-years/half-a-century since IBM shipped a commercial Virtual Machine system I would certainly think that the technology might have advanced a bit.

The virtual tech unraid is writing about it virtualizing x86 computing which started in 2005 with AMD and Intel hardware (and paravirtualization in linux software for pre-2005 chips) It is so advanced and changing so quickly that it's nerdy as possible and poorly documented at it's bleeding edge, keeping it beyond most people's abilities to setup and administer. Unraid appears to be attempting to simplify it.

At work, we keep DVDs or ISOs of all the major MacOS versions so someone could install a particular version if needed. We can often duplicate ailing hard drives with dd-rescue. Apple has also used a great variety of hard drive connectors in their laptops, changing it much more often than the PC makers. We have to keep a variety of adapter boards or adapter ribbon cables for accessing hard drives with different connectors. I think they want people to either to only use factory repair options or upgrade more frequently.

[Jim Andrada]

Before virtualizing X86's, people had been virtualizing mainframes for a couple of decades so it was even in that era basically a matter of moving a well understood technology to the X86 platform, where it continued to evolve. (I started working in the so-called computer biz in 1959 and worked in the same IBM group at Technology Square in Cambridge that developed VM technology, although I worked on a different project.) Most people seem to think that virtualization started in the PC era, but it was already "old hat" by the time the PC put in an appearance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_CP-40)