Thread

I have a storage problem. My first computer was a Macintosh LC with 2mb ram (whoo hoo!) and a 40mb (I think) hard drive.

Now we have a G5 with 2x80GB drives which we have completely filled up for the second time, mostly with video (200mb per minute I believe) of our 2 year old but also with multi-track audio (minimum 10mb per minute per track) and a growing iPhoto and iTunes library. It all adds up very quickly. I’ve dumped the files onto an external hard drive but I wanted to know how others deal with archiving large files. I’m a bit nervous about using hard drives as permanent storage but I thought of possibly running two large drives (500GB, maybe even 1 terabyte), one for storage and one as a safety backup - a clone of the storage drive. I could then use my current 200GB drive to backup system, apps, etc on my powerbook and the internal 2x80GB drives in the G5.I would use SuperDuper (great app) to run this. Maybe I shouldn’t be nervous because in more than 15 years of using computers, I have never had a hard drive failure in my personal setup - not a melt down anyway. Maybe my number is coming up

Does anyone have any archiving tips? Anyone have any experience with Blue Ray or any other similar storage?

For me it’s external hard drives as well. Has worked well so far. Crucial stuff is burned to DVD as well.

You could go for a nas solution with say a raid 5 configuration giving redundancy should one drive go nuts. You don’t need to be a linux geek to set this up either really, there are plenty of ready packaged distro’s that have this functionality ‘out of the box’ so just getting an OK machine, fill it with disks and away you go.

Another option would be a tape drive, which while great I don’t think would suit your circumstances. They’re usually pretty expensive, too.

A dedicated NAS solution is pretty geeky, but I admit I’ve been tempted. Besideds I do consider myself a Linux geek 😊 Yes, a RAID server would be cool (Although RAID 1 should be sufficient for most purposes, running a nightly or so backup)

External hard drives. I have four LaCie FireWire drives, and 2 (500GB) MyBooks, in a daisy chain solution. I’ve been preferring the MyBooks over the LaCie’s (d2s and Porche) as of late. They’re cheaper, more storage, and seem to have about the same life span, and less heat issues. I admit to switching to unencrypted hard drive back-up about 3 years ago. Before that I used encrypted back-up, but they required testing periodically for reliability. Now, I just use a straight forward file for file approach, coupled with ChronoSync (since it can do on plug-in or on mount actions). I plan on getting 2 additional MyBooks before the years end. One will serve as a redundant back-up for client files, and the other to provide yet more space for my growing music, movie, television collection.

At the moment DVD for definite.

At the place where I work I have been using Retrospect with DVD and we have files going back over 15 years that are all still retrievable.
Great because it allows for incremental backups too so you can pause whenever you like and carry on at a later time if you need to.

Even though you have never had a hard-drive failure doesn’t mean that one day you won’t have and never backing things up is a sure fire way to find out the hard way! I think that backing up to external hard-drives is kind of alright but they themselves are subject to breaking down as well so I would suggest you definitely need another medium just in case that does happen.

Hope this helps.

Regards,

Mark

Windows 3.1? :D

Mark, I do backup to the 200GB hard drive I mentioned. I use SuperDuper’s safety clone to backup both hard drives in the G5 plus my Powerbook. But my biggest problem is archiving and DVDs just don’t have the space to archive large multitrack audio and raw video files.

butcher, I’m no Linux geek but that NAS solution could be great. I have also used tape backup in the past and found it pretty much bulletproof so that might also be an option, but could prove overly expensive for a home setup. For the moment I think i may just get a couple of 500GB drives and work from there.

Hey Tim-  I had an inexpensive NAS system for awhile, turned out not to be so great. Eventually the effort to keep the OS on the NAS updated and compatible with newer desktop OSs, fell behind, and the next thing you know, we were down to only one computer that could make admin and system changes to the solution. Not that the hardware was bad itself; but we moved to just external hard drives, so that we didn’t have to work so much about data retrieval on incompatible media. The same issue of course abounds for software and application formats. Some of that old data, still on the NAS, only accessible from our Mac OS 9 machine; also has a host of data conversion to go through before we can actual read it our desktop machines. Most work well, but some we just have to crack open and extract data from.  So we’ve also been a bit better about saving things in as generic of a format as possible. Sometimes this means having a text file, an InDesign or Quark file, as well as a PDF. Because we stopped upgrading Quark, and low and behold, all though client files and publications designed it, are pretty much inaccessible.

For Mark, this is also part of the same reason why we stopped using encryption on our back-ups. Retrospect was, possible still is, a great product. But version 4 is incompatible to version 6, and etc., etc. We went to retrieve a back-up CD from a while back. It could have been Retrospect 3 or 4, but we had Retrospect 5.5 or 6 (Win) available. We got the files off it, but it became its own project, of finding a machine that could run an older version of the software, installing to do the retrieval, repairing the catalog, then just burning more CDs with just the data and only the data.

Having lots of data, in either very large files or even just lots and lots of small to mid-size file. So keeping up with file formats can be just as much of a reliability issue as the life-cycle of the media you use.

Like I said there are several distro’s that are designed to do just this (i.e., samba), and setting them up correctly will keep them up2date automatically.  allgood2 what were the conflicting OS’s?

O’ I wasn’t using a Linux based NAS. We were using Snap! Servers, which came with the Snap OS, which provided Mac, Linux, Windows, and Unix (?) compatibility, as well as offered a private or public web interface. It worked as both a back-up and a file archive for us, since our staff and consultants are spread across the country. It was actually really, very, very nice set-up, until Snap! got purchased, and we stopped upgrading the OS annually like we use to.

I remember space being an issue. Our storage needs jumped a lot in one year, so 250GB just wasn’t nearly enough anymore. With just my external drives, we have over 3TB of storage, and I’m adding 500GB to 1TB per year. The Snap! Servers (NAS) at the storage range we needed, were just out of our price range; and once we couldn’t upgrade hardware, we stopped upgrading software as well. Well, that combined with a bad update by the new owner; it screwed up Mac ownership and privileges. So we were a bit hesitant about applying new ones without hearing user feedback, and then time just kept getting away.

Eventually, we just moved away from the centralize storage/back-up concept, and went for the decentralization approach. Which has been working fairly well. Administrative data gets backed up both locally from all staff, as well as remotely (to a central location). Otherwise, external hard drives. Though the Apple XServe RAID system looks mighty appealing, it’s still out of our price range. I can get 14 500GB hard drives for under $3,000.

Yeah, they don’t have a single power supply, and Dual RAID controllers, cooling and all those wonderful things that make the XServe RAID worth the cost. But, I could actually pay off their cost in a year, where the XServe RAID is definitely a 3 yr expenditure for us. Of course if I bought 14 500GB drives right now, I’d have to upgrade the power supply for my house, so that possible puts the XServe back in competition.
😊