August 26, 2008
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INPUT: Project PCWN, part 1: HD's
So, my laptop HD being compromised has brought a very serious problem to my attention: Even though I always keep multiple copies of all my images, and even though I regularly back up my other important data, what effect would a kaput macbook HD have on my actual work schedule? Chances are, I'd be seriously out of commission for quite some time if I were required to fire up my PC and try to recover emails etc. and "get back to work"...
So, I want to talk more about hard drives, and my concept for a fail-safe backup for both desktop and laptop machines. I don't know if I can get along with having a PC desktop and a Mac laptop, so I'll either be getting a Thinkpad W700 eventually, or I'll just get a refurb Mac Pro tower for "cheap" and do my own upgrades.
Either way, I like to be in charge of what hard drives I use, how they are backed up, and how quickly I can be back to work if a hard drive fails, with the least amount of data loss as possible...
What are my options? I've already outlined the standard procedure of having a faster HD for your OS and all your applications and then a more standard, higher-capacity HD (or two) for your data storage. But now I'm more interested in safety, backup etc.
In a desktop, the ultimate luxury would be to have an in-board, fully-bootable backup of the high-speed (OS) HD. (For those of you who are reading along and learning WITH me instead of giving advice, what I mean is this- I'd have two identical drives in the computer, with identical data on them, and if the main hard drive failed all of a sudden, the computer would just think oh, hmm that hard drive isn't responding, let's try this other one! And boom, just a few seconds after a catastrophic failure I am back in business with hardly a single piece of data missing!)
In a laptop, unless I get a Thinkpad I am limited to one hard drive. Backing up this hard drive, well, how to do it? Just use an external hard drive to periodically create a FULL backup? But then there is the potential to lose recent data such as emails, documents, etc. that may have been created since your last backup. I think.
I could stand to lose a days worth of emails or something, I suppose.
And, for the record, I think it is FAR more convenient to do all document work, emailing etc. from my laptop, since I can take the work with me anywhere and never have to say "oh gosh, that document / email is on my desktop, I can't get it for you right now, or I can't work on it right now... etc..."
So, I'd like to continue to use a laptop for most everything. The only real use I have for a desktop is high-powered imaging, and lots of monitor real estate and storage space with which to do so. I don't feel comfortable running around with more than a 120 / 160 gig laptop, just because the potential to NOT have your data backed up is too great. Or even if your original images are backed up, you could still lose a LOT of photoshop work, especially album design, in a crash. So that is very limiting, whereas a desktop hard drive can be 300 gigs for the OS and 500-750 gigs for the data, with room still for two more HD's to back those up.
Alright I've gotta get back to work, so I'll leave this hanging right here and get back to it later.
For now my main consideration is- I'm running out of storage space and it is time to get a larger capacity HD. Either external although I already have an external G-drive, or internal and I'll just swap it with the current HD in my G-drive inclosure. RAID 1 would be a nice thing, (google G-safe) and I know about Drobo but the last I heard it was still USB 2.0...
The prime candidate is currently a Seagate barracuda 500 gig, 32 mb / 7200 / SATA 3.0 etc. But they actually do NOT get good reviews on Newegg, not as good as the WD equivalent. Which is very odd and makes me hesitate to buy...
=Matt=
UPDATE 01:
Just purchased two Seagate Barracudas, a 250 gig (5400, 8, 1.5) laptop drive and a 500 gig. (7200, 16, 3.0) Installed the 500 gig in my PC tower no problem. Seagate software is cheapo, they want me to pay extra for the auto-backup capability. Meh. Oh and I guess the 137 gig limit on FAT 32 is not a problem anymore? (As a cross-platform user, I'm not a fan of NTFS...)
Next I am going to try and upgrade my mac HD by creating a disk image on an external HD, swapping the laptop hard drives, and then creating another disk image on the new laptop HD, ...and seeing if it works haha... I am so ghetto...
On another note, I still dislike Windows.
=Matt=
Comments (7)
There's a new version of the Drobo with USB 2.0 and Firewire 800. http://www.drobo.com/
As far as your tower is concerned, just RAID you HDDs together rither RAID1 or RAID0+1...if you need the speed. For notebooks, I say either get a copy of a real system backup software and have that run incrementals every night, and write it to a NAS box is the best way to go. If you don't wanna spend that much money, I say get a NAS box, then redirect everything non-OS to the NAS unit, and only store non-OS files on your notebook local drive if you will be away from your office.
First, I want to say that it seems a couple people I know have had problems with their MacBook hard drives, which is an odd coincidence. I'm visiting a friend of mine this week and yesterday the hard drive in his black MacBook went south and we had to run to Best Buy and pick up another (he had to be quickly up and running for work).
Dimsom is right about RAID. Use RAID1 to mirror your desktop drives to that if one fails you simply switch to the other and keep running with no downtime. Also, if you're not running Leopard on your Mac, you should be. Time Machine is enough reason to go pick it up now. My friend whose hard drive failed yesterday uses Time Machine to make hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly backups of his MacBook hard drive onto an external hard drive, so after he put in the new hard drive he simply formatted it and restored from his backup hard drive. It was back to business as usual.
Also, I just picked up a sweet, hot-swappable external hard drive docking station like one my friend is using for $30 at Best Buy when he was getting another 2.5" drive. Check it out:
http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/531
@William - Thank you William for the input!
Actually, my stock macbook hard drive had served me perfectly well for the entire 2+ years that I owned it, I simply replaced it because I was scared of failure after such prolonged abuse...
I just got Superduper! for $30 or so, so I don't really need Time Machine just yet. But yes, Time Machine WILL be in my near future...
Take care,=Matt=
For PC u can use something like Acronis to do full images and incrementals. I've also used Memeo in the past which is kind of interesting because every time a file changes, it will immediately back it up up to X number of versions that you specify.
I do agree that with Macs Time Machine is the way to go. It's actually doesn't do anything all that special, but the big difference is that it's extremely plug-n-play. You just turn it ON and it does everything for you. For super computer geeks that may not be good, but for most purposes it works well.
@soundz - I am definitely not a super computer geek. I need things as idiot-proof and easy to under stand as possible. That's partly why I like Apple so much. They take stuff that PC's can do too but they package it for the non-computer geniuses... Think about it, what is cooler: "Time Machine!" ...or.... "incrementals!" Hah!
=Matt=