Back Up Drives: Portable & Non Portable?

[krissheldon]

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Can I get some recommendations on portable / non portable back up drives? Are all created equal? Any favorites?

 

As always, thanks for any input...

 

Kris

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[brucek]

Kris:

 

I use Mac computers and use external Lacie drives that have both USB and Firewire connections built-in. Are you looking for off-site backup or external drives to take and use as storage on the road?

 

Bruce

[stephengilbert]

For a portable drive, I like the G-Tech Mini. They're small, and are powered by the USB or Firewire connection, so they require no power cord. G-Tech makes several drives, which can be seen here: G-TECH Professional Strength Products

 

Steve

[wparsonsgisnet]

Kris, I also use the LaCie drives, for a windoze machine. I like the triple interface ones as well (firewire and both usb).

 

I also like to buy them from LaCie site as refurb's. The price is unbeatable. Check them out. The last I got was a usb 600gb for peanuts.

[tommycrown]

I Own 2 Macs And A Pc(dell).

 

If You Are Looking For A Desktop(non-portable) Hard Drive, I Recommend Western Digital My Book Pro Either 250gb Or 500gb.

 

They Work With Both Pc And Mac Back And Forth. It Is Very Easy That You Don't Need To Anything But Plug It In Via Usb 2.0 Or Firewire Both 400 And 800.

 

Best Regards,

 

Tommy

 

P.s. Lacie Works Good As Well, Especially With Macs!

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[ericperlberg]

For portable use I use a LaCie Little Big Disk which comes in a 200gb and 320gb 7200rpm versions. It's compact. Using Firewire 800 its very quick and firewire bus powered. I'm pleased with it.

 

My Mac has 4 internal drives so I don't need external drives for it but if I did I would look at buying some sort of empty enclosure and then buying bare drives of high quality. Hooking up bare drives in an external enclosure these days can be done by anyone. They're way cheaper than buying off the shelf hard drives where you're replicating a power supply, enclosure, cables, etc each time you fill up the drive. With bare internal drives mounted in an external enclosure you can always buy the latest, fastest, or most reliable drive at a low price and when they're full, just put them in a closet for archiving and slip in a new drive. Enclosures can be simple and small or quite elegant or even external raid set-ups.

 

Hard drive mechanisms are not created equally. They can vary in speed (up to 10,000rpm), reliability (server grade or enterprise grade are highest), cache (8 or 16mb), and enclosures can be with fan or without fan which can impact reliabiity and how much noise you have in your local work environment. For a complete discussion see this article.

 

When you buy a disk in an enclosure like the LaCie disks or the WD My Book, you should check to see if you can find out which kind of disk they're using internally. A hard drive is not simply a hard drive. If price is all you care about, then the price you really pay may be in speed and reliability.

 

For scratch disks for Photoshop or for Startup disks, you might want a fast 10,000 rpm drive. For backup or data storage you might want a higher reliability MTBF (mean time between failures) or even server grade/enterprise grade 7200 rpm or even 5400 rpm disk. For example a WD Raptor internal drive has an MTBF or 1.2 million hours (although any given drive can fail in the next 5 minutes). Other drives may be 400,000 hours. Usually high MTBF internal drives come with longer warranties should anything go wrong with them but are more expensive. How much would you freak out if you lost your data?

 

Disks slow down as they fill up. So a 7200 rpm 100gig disk which is 3/4 full may well be slower than a 250 gig 5400rpm disk with the same data.

 

If you work with images that are large file sizes in photoshop and your computer doesn't have enough memory then hard drive speed can be quite critical as photoshop (if that's what you use) would be doing a lot of data shifting to the hard drive in repeated page swappings as you work. A slow drive in this scenario can really slow down your work. If you're not in a hurry, no problem. Most people prefer faster to slower.

 

Lastly, since no drive is failure safe, you should have a backup plan in place including good backup software which schedules backups when you're not working. Don't rely on yourself to do backups. Unless you're particularly disciplined, you'll forget or be too busy and then if/when your drive packs in, you're in trouble. Super-Duper on the mac is a good, simple, easy to use programme. Must be something similar on a PC. Also look for and buy a good repair programme. A drive can get currupted and become unusable and a £50 piece of software can remedy that in a few minutes. When it happens (and eventually it will) you'll thank yourself. If you've never had a drive go bad, the clock is ticking. Drives go bad.

[Eoin]

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I've been keeping my eye on this one, DROBO but it's not yet at the races. I'd wait for a firewire and NAS interface before I'd consider it ready for prime time. But the technology looks interesting none the less.

 

Data Robotics, Inc.

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[robsteve]

I use the Western Digital Mybook Pro. I am on a PC. I tested it via Firewire and USBII. The firewire connection was almost as fast as my internal SATA drives. In Canada you can get them at Costco and Staples.

 

Robert

[jtharvie]

Quick Question on these protable drives . . . are they good for archiving? I am a rank amateur but I am now using RAW and the old HardDrive is starting to fill. I like the Western Digital Passport any input on using this type of device for archiving is greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

jth

[wparsonsgisnet]

I would say that any drive is good for making duplicates of files. For purposes of archiving, I would prefer a large drive.

 

Currently, I have archive drives that are the same size, or multiples of, the drive(s) being "mirrored.".

[ericperlberg]

Archiving of digital material is a dicey situation. The fact is that a hard drive sitting in a drawer or closet is not immune from going bad. It will go bad one day, It's not a question of if but when. 5 years seems to be a safe horizon. YMMV. Hopefully within that time some new technology will allow seriously longer storage. It's certainly the holy grail for drive makers. Then you can transfer your data from the current technology to the new one.

 

Back-up strategies are about what level of risk you can afford. No matter how elaborate your strategy, its not fool-proof. If you have critical data (eg, you're a wedding photographer or you do fashion work or you do gallery shows and you make a living from your images), then you need an elaborate strategy. This might include archiving to separate drives and storing one on-site and one copy off site (in case of fire, theft, earthquake, etc etc). If the data isn't critical then you can just store the HD involved.

 

There are 2 philosophies. One is to buy large HDs because they are cheaper per gigabyte and so you keep your costs down. But when a large drive goes bad, you've lost more data. And since the drive will some day go bad...

 

The other philosophy is to buy somewhat smaller drives (say in the 250-400 gig area, this is the age of terrabyte enclosures) and archive with those. My personal rule of thumb is that I buy drives in a size which will fill up in 4-6 mos.

 

Again, using internal drives in an enclosure and swapping them out is far cheaper than buying full drives like the LaCie D2 or WD MyBook drives and using those for archiving because each time you buy a LaCie D2 or MyBook you're buying above and beyond the HD, a case, a controller, port connectors, a power supply, etc.

 

By portable drives I assume you mean something you would normally carry with you on the road. These are even more expensive per gig than desktop drives like the D2. A better strategy for archiving these is to use a good one (eg the little big disk) and when its full, copy it to a cheaper drive (well you know by now I would copy to an internal drive in an enclosure) and use the cheaper drive as the archive. Then when you're sure that your data is safely copied to the archive disk, you can erase the portable drive and use it again.

 

A 320 gig LaCie Little Big Disk costs £249 in the UK. A Seagate 320 gig internal Barracuda hard drive without enclosure costs £45. The Seagate has more advanced technology and is faster. It's 1/5 the price. A drive enclosure costs between £15 and £50 depending on features and is a one time purchase. Buying HDs in cases is really a luxury (read waste of money). The manufacturers are more than happy that most people don't realise or ask questions about what's inside the drive box. They get a good price premium that way.

[Ted W]

I use the Hardfilm drives...

 

http://www.digitalfusion.net/process/hardfilm.php

 

I've never abused one, but they claim to be more robust and designed for photographers.

[4season]

For portable hard drives, I've been meaning to buy a LaCie, as these can be had with both Firewire and USB ports.

 

For home, I'm using Excito's Bubba server, which is actually smaller than some hard drive housings I've used. It's power consumption is very low, it only gets slightly warm to the touch, and it needs no cooling fan, so the only noise is from the hard drive itself. It can be purchased sans hard drive, and that's what I did. I purchased directly from the company in Sweden, and it took a few weeks to arrive in the US of A, most of that spent in customs. Only IDE hard drives are supported, so capacity is effectively limited to 750 gigabytes at the moment.

 

For those who care about such things, Bubba can be customized because it's based on an ARM-9 variant of Debian Linux. Hence, besides web browser and Samba access, ssh works, and so do Debian tricks like apt-get. It also supports daap, so music files you store on it are visible from iTunes.

 

Because it's actually a tiny computer, it can also be placed on the internet for access from anywhere.

[hdg]

At the occasion of my foto-tours I have my sub-notebook with me. Comming back to my mobil-home first I copy the dng-files from the SD-cards to my laptop and secound to an external USB-harddisk (100 GB).

Comming home I copy the data to my desktop PC and secound to an external 400 GB harddisk (Netdrive).

Do this with original files, only. Double saving is very important!

 

Regards Hans, on tour with R9+DMR and D-Lux 3