For the last few years, I’d forced myself to make weekly backups to CD-ROM. Then, when I outgrew 650MB of backup space, I switched to DVD-R. That worked, but backing up was goddawful slow – bringing my system to it’s knees during the backup process. Eventually, I got lax about backing up. It’s been months since I’ve burned a backup disk, and I was starting to get a little nervous. I had been using a tiny portable hard drive, but it was small enough that I had to skip entire directories.
But, today Kevin The IT Elf dropped by my cube with a box – a LaCie Big Disk Extreme – 500GB (half a freaking terabyte) of room to backup with. And I think it comes with every modern connection type – Firewire 400, Firewire 800, and USB 2.0.
LaCie also provides a decent backup app in SilverKeeper – which will automatically backup stuff like my entire ~/dnorman directory, without making my system unusable during backup.
So, now I’ll set my Powerbook to backup via rsynch to my desktop, which will backup to the BDE automatically every morning at 2am. And hope an EMP doesn’t clear all of the platters…
I’m going to sound old here, but I used to have a top-of-the-line FWB RAID system for doing video in the mid-ninetees. 18GB, divided into 10 partitions. On a good day, it could push 5 megs per second. And it cost around $20K. Now, I get 25X the capacity, an order of magnitude increase in performance, for about $400. Heck, my iPod has more room and outperforms that early RAID. I’m a little scared about what kind of storage will be available in another 10 years…
Update: Don’t forget to disable Spotlight on big backup drives…
For the last few years, I’d forced myself to make weekly backups to CD-ROM. Then, when I outgrew 650MB of backup space, I switched to DVD-R. That worked, but backing up was goddawful slow – bringing my system to it’s knees during the backup process. Eventually, I got lax about backing up. It’s been months since I’ve burned a backup disk, and I was starting to get a little nervous. I had been using a tiny portable hard drive, but it was small enough that I had to skip entire directories.
But, today Kevin The IT Elf dropped by my cube with a box – a LaCie Big Disk Extreme – 500GB (half a freaking terabyte) of room to backup with. And I think it comes with every modern connection type – Firewire 400, Firewire 800, and USB 2.0.
LaCie also provides a decent backup app in SilverKeeper – which will automatically backup stuff like my entire ~/dnorman directory, without making my system unusable during backup.
So, now I’ll set my Powerbook to backup via rsynch to my desktop, which will backup to the BDE automatically every morning at 2am. And hope an EMP doesn’t clear all of the platters…
I’m going to sound old here, but I used to have a top-of-the-line FWB RAID system for doing video in the mid-ninetees. 18GB, divided into 10 partitions. On a good day, it could push 5 megs per second. And it cost around $20K. Now, I get 25X the capacity, an order of magnitude increase in performance, for about $400. Heck, my iPod has more room and outperforms that early RAID. I’m a little scared about what kind of storage will be available in another 10 years…
Update: Don’t forget to disable Spotlight on big backup drives…
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my mind has been chewing on the possibilities for a few years now. what happens to a race barely inside the gates of the information age with storage evolution leaving processing in the dust? i anticipated iPods over 50KB songs (btw, what’s taking drive-based PDAs so damn long?), but that’s small potatoes. everything-recorded-all-the time(tm) is forseeable, but what will that MEAN? truth will be more valuable than ever, but in concrete terms i’m still unclear. i want to be there early.
Nice box. I have perhaps 6 of the LaCie’s in the 200-240 Gb range and they ave been very reliable. I had some bad luck getting SilverKeeper to do the timed backups, but that may have been user error.
I have 4 set up on our G4 OSX server which is what our office uses to store project files. I run a copy of RetroSpect there and use 2 of the LaCies to back up that server 2x per week (switching off drive to drive for redundancy). The other 2 are used to do a rettrospect remote backup of our XServe. And I also run a remote backup of my portable FireWire drive that I keep my work files on.
I have 3 more i my office; one I am storing the original audio and Audacity edited files for our podcasts, and another has digitized source video for the moderate amount of digital video editing. I ought to back some of these up.
So I end up with not much project data on my laptop; it’s all on the drives.
Anyhow, they have all been rock solid drives.
But wow, 500 Gb is vast, have fun filling em up!
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Just downloaded SD – thanks for the tip!
I use a older 160GB model at home (the original I think) and with SuperDuper! it’s a great backup system. rsych works as well, but the new version of SD is worth looking into if you want hassle free backup.
Backup good! Fire bad!
May I be the first to suggest you check out SuperDuper!
As far as personal backup is concerned I think it’s the bees knees. I’ve been backing up my various machines for over a year with nary a hiccup. Fast scheduled incremental bootable backups… yum! Saved my bacon a couple of times too.
I have a 500Gb Big Disk Extreme. I am having trouble with the usb port. I am able to mount the drive to my PowerBook G4 using the Firewire 400 and 800 ports but not the usb port. After reformating the drive using the usb port I was able to mount the driving using the usb port but not the Firewire 400/800 ports. Is there any remedy that I can make or do I need to have my drive replaced?