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

[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.