External hard drive stuff

[dvandom]

I realized last night that doing yet another DVDROM backup was a chump's game, now that I can get an external hard drive bigger than my internal HD for $100 or less.

Okay, so here's the poop. I have an iLamp with 100GB HD. It's several years old, and I'm probably going to be replacing it in a year or so (unless it dies on me and requires replacing sooner). I'll cross that bridge when I come to it, but I haven't done a backup in a few months, and with all the music I've ripped since then, even a DVDROM backup isn't necessarily going to be non-PITA. So, I'm thinking of getting an external drive next month (this month I have two weeks of unpaid leave between terms, so I'm trying to avoid major purchases).

I'm currently running OS10.4.something, there's 55G free on my 100G drive, and I'm hoping to be able to set something up where I could launch a backup and then go to bed or work.

A casual check online reveals many brands easily accessible for under $100 that have 160GB (enough to make 3 full copies of what I have on my drive now, maybe 4), going up to 320 or higher for minimal extra cost. So, I have a few questions, both hardware and software.

1) Should I even bother looking for a firewire-connected HD, or has Apple stopped bothering with that and I wouldn't be able to use it on my next machine? Mind you, I'm sure the EEEPC doesn't have firewire, so I'll probably stick with USB anyway, but if I find a really good deal that's firewire I wanna know if it's even worth bothering for my desktop.

2) Any brands I should avoid like the plague? Any I should seek out? I don't want to save $10 if it means losing all my data, but at the same time I'm not keen on spending $10 more when there's no difference in quality.

3) Does 10.4 have a built-in "back this thing up, willya?" utility? If not, any I should look to download? I'm not really keen on playing drag-and-drop and hoping I didn't miss anything hidden in the nooks and crannies. I just want something that will essentially clone my entire HD onto a partition/folder/whatever of another drive while I'm not around. One that can easily run update checks on a schedule would be nice too. I've been doing stuff manually in part because I wanted to avoid backing up unimportant stuff and not having space on the silver disk for important parts, but now I just wanna copy it all.

Comments

[jarodrussell.livejournal.com]

1. I...think...I recall reading that Firewire was close to dead. When I bought my 30GB iPod at the beginning of '06, I don't think it had a Firewire adapter. The new iMac has Firewire ports (http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html), so it's not gone just yet.

2. Maxtor and Western Digital are my favorite brands, in that order. The bulk of my experience is with internal drives, but my 60GB external Maxtor drive has yet to give me in problems in the 6mo~1yr since I've been backing my music up to it. The only Maxtor drive I ever loss was a 160GB drive, but that poor thing had been left in someone's trunk for a couple of weeks, which I believe was the killer more than anything.

3. No idea, but I was under the impression, from my time with 10.2, that OSX was the kind of thing where you just backed up the whole drive.

[lameazoid.livejournal.com]

Don't buy a Seagate one. We bought a 500 gig Seagate model at Sam's club for cheap at work for the production guys to use as a back up (why they need a backup for a 4 terrabyte raid is beyond me) and it failed within days. Reading on amazon suggested they have frequent failures of this sort.

It looked a lot like this 400 gig model (http://www.amazon.com/Seagate-ST3400601U2-RK-External-Hard-Drive/dp/B000BT4BVY/ref=pd_bbs_sr_10/002-8511872-4926447?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1187878070&sr=8-10), though that 400 gig model seems ot have good user reviews.

[sigma7.livejournal.com]

There's SuperDuper (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html) for shiny backup solutions -- if you're not afraid of getting your hands dirty, you can backup OS X as-is (http://www.egg-tech.com/mac_backup/). It's not quite as user-friendly as Time Machine is/will be, but you've got the mad skillz to make it happen.

I know nothing about Firewire's future -- I just find Firewire invaluable in creating bootable drives to use in the labs (boot to the external, image the hard drive, and roll). It's not without an expense, but I usually find it tolerable. (There are some competitively-priced Firewire-capable drives in the Union Computer Store, and failing that, there's always buying an external shell, a new hard drive, and putting them together. I did resist the Lego-esque La Cie externals, and I deserve a damn medal for that.) I prefer Firewire/USB, but yeah, under no circumstances am I going Firewire-only anymore.

[gary-williams.livejournal.com]

Regarding question 2, I would advise that you avoid Maxtor. 13 years of experience, and conversations with friends who have suffered multiple drive failures, has taught me that the failure rate of Maxtor drives is disproportionately high compared to other brands.

Seagate owns Maxtor now, and I'm a bit worried about the possibility of Seagate devices being re-branded as Maxtor or vice-versa. I think Seagate intends to use the Maxtor name just for their low-end, consumer-grade drives.

[gary-williams.livejournal.com]

Some of my experience with Maxtor drives comes from working in a college IT department, where I had to deal with hardware problems on a daily basis. My colleagues and I decided that Maxtors made good door stops and paper weights.

[lord-xiphos.livejournal.com]

My own experience has taught me to always go with the longest warranty and a RAID array.
At this point, all companies are pretty equivelant in the reliability department; I hear people swear by and at all the brands pretty equally. The thing is when a defect does enter a production line, it tends to hit multiple drives in a row, possibly up to thousands at a go. If this defect is not found for a day or two, this could mean whole batches of defective drives shipped to one region, while pre or post-defect drives get shipped everywhere else, resulting in this percieved drive preference being somewhat regional or store-specific.

So you never know whether you have a good drive or a bad drive untill it's in use. If you're lucky, it will fail pretty much right away and you can get it store-swapped early on. Go through this untill you get a non-defective drive. If you're less lucky, you could go months, even a few years, before the defect results in data loss. This is where the warranty replacement would come in, but does no good for data recovery.

If data integrity is your goal, what you really want is some type of RAID array. You can get a decent NAS for about $500 (sans drives) that would support 1, 5, 5+hotspare and 10 (one-zero, not ten). It would support 0 too, but you really don't want 0 for data storage.

It sounds expensive, but so are data recovery services. The real question is how much is your data worth to you?

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Very little of my data is actually the only version of it. Programs (where I have the installation disk or can re-download), songs (which I can re-rip in 99% of cases), art (which can be re-scanned or the source images for which are still on an SD card, plus most of it is also on some other machine with its own backups). My home machine dying would cost me almost no actual data, just hassle and time, which is why I'm not looking at $500+ solutions.

[lord-xiphos.livejournal.com]

Then why bother with any additional backups at all? Sounds like you're pretty well covered.

If it's to reduce downtime from reinstalling everything, you're ultimately probably better off just reinstalling after a critical hardware failure, anyhow.

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Well, ripping CDs and scanning art still takes more time than doing backups. Plus, I'm also thinking in terms of ease of migration once I do get a new machine. It's worth $100 to me to be able to just plug something in and set it churning overnight as opposed to monitoring disc-filling and stuff. :)

[lord-xiphos.livejournal.com]

Wy not set up a network between the new computer and the old one, and do a direct data transfer instead of an indirect of transferring data to the external drive then over to the new computer? It's less expensive and cuts out a step. Considering the bandwidth constraints of USB, it would probably be faster, too.

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

Physical lack of space to put two computers? Plus, this way I also have backups a bit more easily while I wait.

Anyway, I'm not looking for alternatives to an external drive, I've already decided that's what I'm doing. Not a RAID, not a computer-to-computer network, not more DVDROMs, not an online backup service. I'm just trying to get some advice on external drives.

[lord-xiphos.livejournal.com]

*shrug* Just throwing some alternatives out for your consideration.

Any given brand drive these days is probably going to have an equal chance of failure for the reasons I stated above.

Get the one with the biggest warranty for the least cost, then.

[jarodrussell.livejournal.com]

Have you considered Box.net (http://box.net/)?

[dvandom.livejournal.com]

I've considered online backup as a class, and decided against it, at least for now.

[grant-p.livejournal.com]

I've tried to stick with USB for the mot compatibility as I move between machines, but your millage may vary depending on how often you actually do that. I'm still using CD-RW's, which work perfectly for me. But I'm also dealing with three to four computers at a time that I'm trying to keep current between three different OS's, so the CD's have advantages. No driver issues, for starters, even on older machines.