Rolo Posted November 17, 2009 Share #1 Posted November 17, 2009 Advertisement (gone after registration) ... but not me. I've run close to the wind for too long with inadequate back-up storage for my wedding shoot images. Three external drive failures, all casing and switch failures, have prompted me to do something about it. Last week I purchased a NewerTech Voyager S2 Sata Dock, for about £50, and today I've backed up all my computer drives onto Seagate drives and now I'm well covered for anything barring a house fire. Superb quality docking unit,like a big iPod dock, and the Seagate Barracuda drives are cheap, or can even be extracted from your old computer. Forgot to say that I made a disc image of the drive dedicated to software. That would have been a pain to rebuild as there would have been no computer to do it with, then once Snow Leopard was re-installed, I'd need to download all the software from the developers and find the keys and passwords. Bear in mind that if you're using Photoshop CS3 etc etc, Adobe no longer offer a download facility for it from their site, so you're really scrambling. Now I just need to plug the copy disc in. I've only just done this so I'm no smart ass. Recommended. see http://www.newertech.com/products/voyager_index.php Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advertisement Posted November 17, 2009 Posted November 17, 2009 Hi Rolo, Take a look here Disc failure ...... Oh No, Not any more !!. I'm sure you'll find what you were looking for!
chris_tribble Posted November 21, 2009 Share #2 Posted November 21, 2009 Rolo - very interesting. I manage with stacks of external firewire drives but this looks interesting. Am I right in thinking that it accepts any BARE drive? In practical terms, how do you store your old hard-drives? Ziplock back and a cupboard drawer? The archive's getting bigger, so this could be interesting... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rolo Posted November 21, 2009 Author Share #3 Posted November 21, 2009 I think it's quite amazing Chris as it's so easy to do and there's no unnecessary waste in backing up the back-ups. I was moving towards a Drobo, but 30% is lost in security and the cost would have been £400+. This Voyager2 takes bare drives and I can back them up as my needs require. The cost of double and triple back up is a choice I can make for the cost of an additional drive. Storage is not an issue as they are so small. I place the drive in an anti-static box and the four of them are stored in a drawer. Simple. What I really liked was: the original Mac drive was a 320 gig unit, I made an image of that on a 500 gig unit and substituted it to ensure that it worked OK and left it there. Now all my software is in a drawer on the original Mac drive and I'm 100% confident that if needed I could recover in a New York heartbeat. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
andybarton Posted November 21, 2009 Share #4 Posted November 21, 2009 Don't rely on external USB drives as a means of booting a Mac if the internal drive has gone TU... Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rolo Posted November 21, 2009 Author Share #5 Posted November 21, 2009 Don't rely on external USB drives as a means of booting a Mac if the internal drive has gone TU... No, the external drive is a bare Seagate Barracuda. Slots straight into the 1st internal drive bay and power up. Maybe I've not presented the right picture. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff S Posted November 22, 2009 Share #6 Posted November 22, 2009 . I was moving towards a Drobo, but 30% is lost in security and the cost would have been £400+. Could you please explain this comment? Thanks. Jeff Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rolo Posted November 22, 2009 Author Share #7 Posted November 22, 2009 Advertisement (gone after registration) Not an expert on this, but my understanding is that the Drobo makes back-ups in real time and has the capability of recovering from a drive failing within the unit. To do this, it stores secondary back-up information across the other drives, thereby reducing the total available space from the sum of the individual drives, to something 30% less. If you visit the Drobo web site, there's a facility that demonstrates this. The costs are apparent from the price of the units. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
wlaidlaw Posted November 22, 2009 Share #8 Posted November 22, 2009 You can format a 16GB SDHC card as OSX journaled with a GUID partition and load either Leopard or Snow Leopard onto it. It can then act as a boot drive, so that you can do repairs etc to your main drive. This will work either via a card reader or the SD slot on later MPB's. This is particularly useful if your machine has locked up with a disc in the DVD drive. There is a problem currently with Snow Leopard on certain machines with external hard drives attached. When they wake from sleep, there is a kernel panic in the finder coreservices Cocoa module and finder freezes. If you try a force restart of Finder, you will get Finder error 10810. The only way round this at present is the undesirable act of unplugging the offending external hard drive and finder will spring to life or force a power off by holding the power button down. If you have terminal open, you can try "sudo killall finder" and coreservices may restart. Apple is working with various beta testers to resolve the problem but the initial seed of 10.6.3 beta has not solved it yet. The problem is also crashing Capture Data program, making it very difficult to track the exact cause of the issue. Wilson Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
stunsworth Posted November 22, 2009 Share #9 Posted November 22, 2009 Not an expert on this, but my understanding is that the Drobo makes back-ups in real time and has the capability of recovering from a drive failing within the unit. The advantage of a Drobo - or any other raid system - is that if a disk in the Drobo/Raid fails you lose no information as everything is up to date and you just need to replace the drive. If a Mac drive fails and you need to revert to an external back up as described above, you would lose everything between when the last back up was done and the time the Mac drive failed. That could be critical under certain circumstances. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rolo Posted November 22, 2009 Author Share #10 Posted November 22, 2009 That could be critical under certain circumstances. For which you must take adequate precaution. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
biglouis Posted November 22, 2009 Share #11 Posted November 22, 2009 This looks great and can I add a fantastic solution for offsite backup. At present I am using a heavy robust drive to take my pictures to school for offsite backup. You do realise that no matter how many backups you make if a thief breaks in and pinches all your equipment then you've lost your primary and backups? That's why once a month I back up my images to an external hard drive and keep it in my drawer at work (on the principle I am unlikely to be robbed at home and work at the same time). Just a thought LouisB Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
mby Posted November 22, 2009 Share #12 Posted November 22, 2009 The advantage of a Drobo - or any other raid system - is that if a disk in the Drobo/Raid fails you lose no information as everything is up to date and you just need to replace the drive. If a Mac drive fails and you need to revert to an external back up as described above, you would lose everything between when the last back up was done and the time the Mac drive failed. That could be critical under certain circumstances. What happens if the controller/power brick of the Drobo fails? Best regards, Michael Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
stunsworth Posted November 22, 2009 Share #13 Posted November 22, 2009 What happens if the controller/power brick of the Drobo fails? You go back to your mirrored Drobo, or in the worst case your off-site backup <grin> Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jeff S Posted November 22, 2009 Share #14 Posted November 22, 2009 Not an expert on this, but my understanding is that the Drobo makes back-ups in real time and has the capability of recovering from a drive failing within the unit. To do this, it stores secondary back-up information across the other drives, thereby reducing the total available space from the sum of the individual drives, to something 30% less. If you visit the Drobo web site, there's a facility that demonstrates this. The costs are apparent from the price of the units. Ok, but that seems like maybe 30% less space, not 30% less security...in fact maybe better security given less chance one unit loses all info. But, I'm no expert either. Jeff Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rolo Posted November 22, 2009 Author Share #15 Posted November 22, 2009 Ok, but that seems like maybe 30% less space, not 30% less security...in fact maybe better security given less chance one unit loses all info. But, I'm no expert either. Jeff I agree, that's a better choice of words. TBH, I handle about 2,500 images a month for 8 or 9 months of the year. My main concern is having my clients RAW files to hand and not the latest jpeg B&W conversion I loaded to this Forum. A weekly back-up of a single 'current' drive and an occasional back-up of a completed projects drive will cover that for me and I consider my process for that level of security is in place. This simple system is a huge step forward for me and as I'm not Tesco, I think it'll be OK. Just trying to share the idea with others. If I was a Sunday morning shooter, I might not care for anything other than a few life-time keepers on a DVD. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
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