Storage - Backup - Archive - Macbook pro

[OoxoO]

I just got a new Macbook Pro.

I am into photography and music. I want to get a working storage, backup, and archive system in place. I have a solution i think will work for my needs.

I would like advice on whether or not to use hardware RAID 1 (not software RAID 1). Other advice is welcome too. Thanks.

Below are the two versions:


Version one (with hardware raid 1)

1. internal hard drive (MBHD):

a. store: OS, apps, plus other​

2. On-site

a. external hard drives, RAID 1 (Alpha & Bravo)​

i. store: iTunes library and Photos​

ii. attached via firewire​

b. external hard drive (TM)​

i. Partitioned​

1) Bootable backup of MBHD​

2) Time Machine backups (MBHD & external drive Alpha)​

3. Off-site

a. hard drive (Charlie)​

i. store: copy of external drive Alpha​

ii. Bravo & Charlie go round robin from on-site to off-site​

Version two (no RAID)

1. internal hard drive (MBHD):

a. store: OS, apps, plus other​

2. On-site

a. external hard drive (Alpha)​

i. store: iTunes library and Photos​

ii. attached via firewire​

b. external hard drive (Bravo)​

i. store: copy of Alpha​

c. external hard drive (TM)​

i. Partitioned​

1) Bootable backup of MBHD​

2) Time Machine backups (MBHD & external drive Alpha)​

3. Off-site

a. external hard drive (Charlie)​

i. store: copy of external drive Alpha​

ii. Bravo & Charlie go round robin from on-site to off-site​

 

[ChrisA]

Keep it simple...

Use TM and put nothing else but TM on that drive. The more room you give TM the better. Use the largest drive you own for this and just leave it alone.

Next: You on-site and off-site backups drives should be treated just as a pool of drives that you rotate around. Don't dedicate one for on-site and one for off site. What you do is make a backup and then take it off site and bring old one that was there back home with you. Rotate them. When the drives are home I keep them in a cheap fire safe I bought at Home Depot. Yu can get them as cheap as $35 but I paid $65 for a larger one. Don't bother with a "security" safe. Thieves think there might be valuable in there. Get the kind designed for office files with the cheap key lock.

What I do is used the biggest external I own for the TM drive and then every year buy a new drive and retire the smallest and oldest drive. I 've got four drives, the oldest one is four years old and my system costs me now about $100 a year. The key here is to keep buying drives to you never have to trust you data is a ten year old device. Also rotation insures that each drives is tested frequently. When a drive gets to small it tends to also be four or so years old, so I retire it and replace it with the biggest one the is cost effective. to day that would be a 1.5TB for about $120. (the 2TB drives are to expensive.

Some one with more data them I would need to use "drive sets" rather then drives, small RAID boxes and rotate the boxes around but my setup covers you if you only have about 750Gb to 1TB of data on-line. Currently all my stuff adds up to about 800GB.

 

[OreoCookie]

Your scheme is too complicated -- which makes it less likely that you'll stick to it. I assume you have three external harddrives already:
(1) Dedicate one drive to Time Machine. No games with cloning and stuff, it's completely pointless if you have Time Machine. Restoring from a Time Machine backup is as fast as restoring from a clone.
(2) You may want to keep a second drive for Aperture Vaults. If you have to do it manually, forget about it. Use the drive for offsite storage.
(3) Keep the third and probably also the second drive at different locations. The best way to do this is to take your ProBook (rather than your other backup drives) with you and do a backup.

 

[CrackedButter]

My current setup consists of 2 firewire hard drives connected to my MB. 1 is a Time Machine Drive (500GB), the other is a 320GB which I make manual backups to of my important folders. I don't regard TM as 100% so I manually backup my Music folder, Documents folder, etc etc.

This solution takes hardly 2 minutes to operate each week, I only ever touch the 320GB drive once a week. All this runs off 1 firewire cable for a clean desktop experience .

 

[OoxoO]

OreoCookie-

I don't have any external drives for the macbook pro yet. And i am using lightroom instead of apeture.

I know for sure i want to keep my photos and lossless music on an external drive and use my internal drive just for applications and small files (liks docs, etc...). So external drive Alpha will be my working drive.

Basically, yes there will be three drives but one of them will be redundant (either using Rad 1 or not). Introducing the redundant drive brings the total to 4.

1 internal drive for apps, 1 external (alpha) as working/storage of photos and lossless music, 1 external drive (bravo) for a back up of alpha, 1 external (TM) partitioned for a boot drive and Time machine, 1 external (charlie) for an offsite archive of Alpha. Drive Charlie trades from onsite to offsite with bravo.

CrakeButter-

Your sounds like a simlified version of what i will do except you are using you internal drive in the same way i will use my external drive Alpha and i also introduce redundancey and an offsite backup.

ChrisA-

You said, "You on-site and off-site backups drives should be treated just as a pool of drives that you rotate around"

That is what i call round robin and is accomplised with Drivves Bravo and Charlie.

And, do you think its bad to partition my largest drive--one for a bootable clone and the other for Time machine?

 

[OreoCookie]

I know for sure i want to keep my photos and lossless music on an external drive and use my internal drive just for applications and small files (liks docs, etc...).

Any particular reason why?
You can get 500 GB 2.5" notebook drives these days, it should be much easier to keep your active projects on a local drive and transfer old/completed project onto an external drive. Drives are plenty big for most things. And they're faster than external 3.5" drives (~50-70 MB/s vs. 30-40 MB/s).

But anyway, how much data do you have (in GB)?

Basically, yes there will be three drives but one of them will be redundant (either using Rad 1 or not). Introducing the redundant drive brings the total to 4.

I think you're misusing the term redundant a little: redundancy means that your data is available on several harddrives. So it's not one `redundant drive,' you have three (all of your backup drives).

You also seem to misunderstand the purpose of RAID1: it's supposed to allow you to continue working even if a drive fails. It doesn't protect you against the most common source of data loss: humans and software bugs.

1 internal drive for apps, 1 external (alpha) as working/storage of photos and lossless music, 1 external drive (bravo) for a back up of alpha, 1 external (TM) partitioned for a boot drive and Time machine, 1 external (charlie) for an offsite archive of Alpha. Drive Charlie trades from onsite to offsite with bravo.

Another thing regarding backups: you must never work off your backup. Hence, it's not particularly useful to have a boot partition on the same drive as your backup. Either you get an additional (old) drive for this or simply forgo this step. Depending on the amount of data, it takes only 2 hours or so to restore from a backup (basically that's determined by the raw throughput of your drive). Restoring from a clone won't be any faster than restoring from Time Machine, for instance. Cloning is a bad backup strategy.

For the other backups, I recommend you have a look at Synk. Unlike SuperDuper, it is capable of incremental backups and even 1-to-N backups (meaning one source, multiple targets, you could execute backups on your two on-site drives simultaneously).

 

[OoxoO]

Yeah, I plan to have lots of photos and music. 400 cds and about 100gb in images. Images will grow fast.

Thanks for the rest of the input, i'll take a look at it and see what i can learn.

 

[OreoCookie]

Yeah, I plan to have lots of photos and music. 400 cds and about 100gb in images. Images will grow fast.

You can easily fit the music and currently all of the images onto an internal 2.5" harddrive with plenty of room to spare (the largest drives give you about 400-500 GB of space). (The compression ratio of lossless audio codecs is about 50 %, i. e. about 350~400 MB disc space per CD; 400 CDs should take up no more than 140~160 GB of space.) With any modern image management app, you can move parts of your library onto an external harddrive when you need to.

 

[OoxoO]

Add a bunch of new RAW pics and a few videos to the mix and the free space starts to dry up pretty quick...