Call me over cautious, but...

donreynolds · Post by **donreynolds** » Sat Nov 20, 2010 7:43 pm

Last year the "when not if" happened to me.
I was running a verify disk activity and noticed that my 250 GB MacPro hard drive was failing me. I had never backed up a drive before and did not know how, but I leaned real fast. Unfortunately, not fast enough. Lost a lot of personal stuff.

Thank God I had all my projects on another drive. An older LaCie 120 GB drive. Not real reliable to say the least. Previously I had all my older projects on it.

After that, The more I got to thinking how many hours (and headaches) have been put into projects I bought a Raptor 150GB HD to run my projects from, and also a WD MyBook 1 TB studio edition II and learned how to back up my main drive. I bought another one to back up my Raptor. They were Raid 1 mirrored so I knew that I had redundancy with my back ups at least. I also learned how to make a bootable disk with CCC. That is a must I am finding out.

Since then I have purchased a MacBook Pro and also a MacBook for my daughter. I got to thinking again. I have all my projects on the MyBook studio. and even though it is mirrored, it is essentially the same drive unit. What if something happened to it? Do I then

Now Hard Drives are getting pretty cheap for the memory. I thought if i really wanted peace of mind I would go a step farther. I learned here how to Partition one of the MyBook studios to back up my main HD, the Raptor, and the MacBook Pro.

The other MyBOOk studio backs up all the the Raptor projects again, as this is where I have all my current projects in progress, and also it now has ALL my previous DP projects on it. Redundancy again. I then bought another Raptor 150GB to assist with current projects and it will back up the other Raptor. I bought a MyBook Lx 1 TB and will set it up as a redundant back up to my main hard drive and just for extra storage.

Then just for kicks, I found a really portable Toshiba Canvio Plus 750GB USB HD. I set it up as a boot drive for my MacBook Pro for when I start using it with AT3 and my Stomp IO to have a back up and bootable disk in case of problems. This will also back up my daughters MacBook Which does not have any system disks (Ebay).

It may sound crazy but I think my systems will be redundant 2 to 3 times over. Now I do not worry if one of my drives fail or even two. I am diversified and feel much safer. It costs a few hundred here and there, but hey I know I would be wishing i spent that if something happened and I did not have something backed up.

I now have CCC set up to schedule daily incremental back ups of all main drives.

As I said, call me cautious but, "sighs breath of relief..."

BradLyons · Post by **BradLyons** » Sun Nov 21, 2010 6:57 am

Hey Don, how's it going?? I'm not sure if you know, but I'm in Atlanta now! ANYWAY...... Aside from performance reasons this is the #1 reason that I suggest a secondary drive for all audio information. SHOULD you ever have a computer issue, the drive needs to be re-formated or replaced---you lose your data! Sorry you lost so much personal stuff, that is never fun

I don't think anyone backs up as often or as much as they should, your's truly included.

donreynolds · Post by **donreynolds** » Sun Nov 21, 2010 9:53 am

Hey Brad, Yeah I knew you had came south. I used to live there in the Stone Mountain area and also in Buford. I may get to see you sometimes as I get down that way once or twice a year.

Yeah, I lost a bunch of photos that I would have liked to keep. But hey, everythings good now. I feel that I have a very redundant back up system in place now.

Glad to here you are doing well. Figured GC or someone would get you sooner or later.

Shooshie · Post by **Shooshie** » Sun Nov 21, 2010 10:57 am

I've now got FOUR 2 TB drives, and a number of 1 TB and other high-volume drives. Last night I just installed a 2TB drive as my main boot drive, and in the process I learned that a sizable chunk of data that's very important to me is not getting backed up regularly. I've spent the morning backing up about a TB of data. I've got multiple redundancies on most of my important data, and if I could have my way, I'd have about six 10-TB drives. (if they made such a thing) I'd make them all identical.

The saddest thing is that millions of people are collecting their entire family memories on digital media with no backup. They do not realize that any given drive can go at any time, and when it does, those pictures of the kids are just… gone. Even archival CDs and DVDs have a very short life span. DVDs that are 10 years old will often have severe problems that are unrecoverable. So not only do we have to keep backing up, but we must always keep managing our backups. The average consumer will not do this. I predict a huge backlash from it within the next decade, and a lot of people are going to go to something like OSX with its automatic backup system once they realize how dire is their situation. Some may even resort back to hard-copies. Print out everything they want to keep -- and there's another potential problem if tghey don't use archival inks and papers.

Life's not permanent, and neither are memories. Old 8-mm and super-8 movies from the 1950's and 1960's are now cracked and brittle. Old photographs fade, get torn, stained, scratched. The ones that make it a hundred years are the exceptions, not the rule. It's an ongoing preservation process, and if any link in the chain is weak, or if anyone ever lets down their guard while they are the responsible party on watch, the stuff is all gone.

Near Moab, Utah, there is a canyon called Barrier Canyon with a gallery of petroglyphs called the "Great Gallery." Some of these have recently been dated more closely than previous attempts could get, and the new estimates place a few of the figures at over 7000 years. The people who made them, assuming they were people, are long gone, and we do not know what they were thinking, why they made them, or what they "mean." They are so archival that their memory mocks their creators as well as all of us and our technology. If you want things to last a long time, paint them into a rock-faced cliff in a protected canyon. If you don't have one handy, then frequent backups and periodic management of your media will be required just to get your important files to the next generation.

Shooshie

YouTube · Post by **James Steele** » Sun Nov 21, 2010 11:24 am

You wanna hear a sad but true story? Years ago a friend's wife left the VHS tape of their son's birth (the ONLY copy) in the VCR after watching it. The next day when she got home from work, she realized she had forgotten that the VCR was programmed to automatically record her soap operas during the day! At the time, I worked on staff at a video production firm and she called frantically to see if it could be recovered. I had to tell her it couldn't. Most consumers don't (or didn't) even know about the record-protect tabs on audio and video tape cassettes. Neither did she.

buzzsmith · Post by **buzzsmith** » Sun Nov 21, 2010 3:34 pm

When I'm working on an active project I have 3 copies of the file, and I'm encouraging clients to take, either on flash or external portable drives, a copy, too (off-site backups).

1. The primary and active work file which is on what I call my "Audio" drive.

2. A backup on an external FW HD.

3. And a (external HD) Time Machine backup, as well.

However, when I've completed the project (client's happy, work is done) I will burn a DVD (more if needed depending on file size) of the completed project. And that's now my only archived file.

Trying to figure out a way to do both...I guess a 1TB external for now would give me a degree of more protection...a DVD copy and a copy on the HD.
When it gets full, then a 2nd drive, etc.

However, "Nihil aeternum est"

Thanks for the reminder to back up non business/recording files (like photos, etc.) Those are things one tends to overlook when we are in the business that we're in.

Maybe that's a good thing about Facebook...I could upload the ones I want to save there! (max 200 photos per album)

I've also been there, too, in regards to losing important video, James.

Back in the camcorder days, I rewound the tape too far and lost some important family moments that are, indeed, unrecoverable.

Buzzy

twistedtom · Post by **twistedtom** » Mon Nov 22, 2010 12:18 am

Most people like us who do a lot with computers back up every thing often. I hear sad stories from people who lost all their photos and every thing they have done as they never backed them up. The two things I always tell people is; to save and save often, if it is importent save as a copy and to back every thing up, the more places the better.
We have all learned this the hard way.

donreynolds · Post by **donreynolds** » Mon Nov 22, 2010 5:21 pm

As I said, hard drives are a lot cheaper now days. But I try to buy reliable hard drives. there are a lot out there that I would not trust. I cannot believe my old 120GB Lacie is still working..I kept hearing about how they were not very reliable before.

I think every so often an older drive might be proactively replaced?

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