Hard Drive Woes
Posted by Nathaniel.
A post in which our hero basically bitches at length about the fact that he’s not made of money and the fact that backups are incredibly important.
My recent camera purchase has brought up some serious issues. For one, it’s made me want to buy some new lenses. Unfortunately, the lenses that I want are all in the $1500 range. (Really nice glass though.)
The second issue is that the camera produces an amazing amount of data. The way I’m recording images, a 4 GB card only holds around 126 pictures. On a shortish hike or something with my film camera, I’d easily shoot 4 or 6 rolls of film which would be more like 200 images. That really adds up.
Also, since the digital camera doesn’t actually produce anything physical, it’s very important that you have the images securely saved. With film, I typically have scans of almost all my images and then I still have the slide or negative as well. In the case of hard drive failure, I could always rescan. That’s not possible with the digicam. In the end, that means multiple backups.
At the moment, I’m trying to make sure that I have two copies of all my data. So my laptop has an external hard drive to back up and the iMac has an external drive as well. However, the digital camera pictures will overwhelm the computers’ internal drives before too long, so I really need an external for storing pictures plus a backup for that external. This double storage is how it starts getting expensive.
Plus, I like to buy fancy things. What I really want is oneof these. Nothing like a TB of mirrored RAID storage on your desktop. Cha-ching $699. Plus another $300 for a TB drive to back up the RAID. (RAID protects against a hard drive mechanism dying, but does nothing against lightning strikes or getting dropped off a table.)
So basically, it’s $1000 to do things right. I have a feeling that I’m just going to do nothing.
I need to start posting some pictures too.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:58 am Using
Oooh, fancy hard drives are sweet. I’ve actually been dealing with the same problem - not that my photos are nearly as clever or high-tech as yours, but backing up is still an issue and my powerbook is not getting any younger.
Speaking of firewire drives and whatnot, I do have to say that I’m well-pleased with Time Machine. Work bought me a nice new 2TB firewire 800 drive from LaCie, and boy does that thing run smoothly. I have already had several instances were it’s been a big lifesaver to go back a few hours and grab some file or other.
It’s also impressive that when I first installed the drive, somehow the preferences got swapped so I was booting off of the external drive and didn’t notice any lag in performance - didn’t notice at all until the next day when my files were ‘missing’.
Meanwhile, the guy in the office next door was struggling through the simple process of “partition external drive, create disk image, copy backup, etc”… because he’s working with XP, everything is infernally/infinitely more difficult. Granted the encryption issue is tricky, but nonetheless I couldn’t help but feel a little smug about having a Mac.
May 16th, 2008 at 1:59 am Using
Oh, and yes, definitely need to start posting some photos, g-money.
May 16th, 2008 at 11:45 am Using
Firewire 800 is pretty impressive. It’s faster than any hard drive mechanism and only a little bit slower than the cache on a hard drive so it works very nicely indeed. The only thing better is eSATA, but that’s still pretty rare.
So which of the LaCie drives is it? The 2big or the Biggest Quadra?
As much as I’d like a RAID system, I think I’m just going to go for multiple single disks. I ordered a 320 GB portable USB drive yesterday for backing up my iMac and that’ll free up the 500 GB drive I’m currently using as a backup. Then, I’m going ton switch my laptop backup to an older drive which will free up part of a different 500 GB drive… so I can store my pictures on the one 500 GB drive (with firewire 800) and then back it up on the other 500 GB drive (which is only usb).
Then, when I hit the lottery, I’ll go for a networked RAID5 array with 14 TB of storage and a built in tape library.
May 16th, 2008 at 12:53 pm Using
Good god, I’m still only working with an 80 G hard drive and 40 G external. And 20 G ipod which doubles as my “backup” for my music collection. Speaking of which, I really need to burn that to disk. And my photos, so I can clear off the camera card again. iPhoto insists on going back through EVERY image every time I try to import the new ones. I’ll probably need more storage though when I get the data for my research.
May 16th, 2008 at 6:47 pm Using
Time Machine is sweet. But I find myself often hesitate to connect my MBP to the external hard drive because I don’t really have a big enough external hard drive. With the huge 250GB drive of my MBP now, my 160GB external hard drive obviously can’t take it all. For now I only run time machine once in a while and before that I usually do some clean-up. And I have two partitions and only sync one of them…. I guess I’m not really using TM in the right way at all….
May 17th, 2008 at 1:03 am Using
Yeah, if you’re only going to do periodic backups, you may be better off with SilverKeeper or SuperDuper, and schedule daily/weekly backups of certain folders.
And I know that $100 bills don’t grow on trees, but it’s worth pretending that your hard drive just died, and that you have to re-do all the programming work since your last backup. If that pushes your heart rate above 200, then maybe that $$ seems more reasonable?
May 18th, 2008 at 11:27 pm Using
The drive I just got was a portable USB Western Digital 320 GB and it ended up being $139. The 250 GB drives are under $100, in fact I think I saw it at http://www.bhphotovideo.com for $85 if I remember right. I’m going for portable bus-powered drives for backups right now because it cuts one more failure point out of the equation. On a desktop drive, the power supply could die. Of course, the drive won’t be as fast, but it’s only something that I’ll be running once a week.
They say there are two types of people in the world: those who back up and those who haven’t had a hard drive die yet!