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Help creating backup system for prof. photog.

2A Batterie

2A Batterie

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
My good friend is a professional photographer who, while not totally inept on Macs and photoshop, is not necessarily a computer whiz and needs help setting up some sort of easy backup system. She has a Dual 1.8 G5 with 2gb of ram and wants to set it up to run all of her photoshop projects. The computer only has an 80gb HD in it, and she is going to replace that with a two 250gb drives along with a 1TB My Book Pro II from WD. She is going to be working on about 2-5 projects at a time that will be no greater than 15gb in size each. Her main concern is backing everything up all the time and not risking or worrying about losing all sorts of files in a crash.
My initial thoughts are to partition the internal drives- one 120gb partition for apps, and then break the rest of the space up into multiple sizes that would handle a variety of projects.
Here's where I (we) start getting a little bit confused: the WD My Book 1TB supposedly has two internal 500gb HD's. I think she wants the first WD HD to mirror the two HD from inside the G5 (I'd assume in RAID 1 config) and the second WD HD to mirror the other HD inside the My Book. She also wants either one-touch backup or it just to backup up periodically so she has to do nothing. Here are my main questions:
1)Is RAID 1 the proper config, since redundancy is the main goal?
2)Is it necessary to have one of the internal 500gb HD's inside the WD My Book mirror the other?
3)What's the best and/or easiest way to create this whole configuration for a moderately computer literate person?
4)What's the best way to change the boot drive from the 80gb to one of the 250gb? She has all of her programs (photoshop, final cut, shake, etc) on the 80gb but wants to get them on one of the 250gb. I told her to sort through and look for all the licenses just in case she has to uninstall and reinstall. Is there a way to setup a new boot drive and put the programs on it without all the hassle?

Thanks for the help!
 
1) RAID 1 will protect from hardware failure, but it will not safeguard against user error. Its mirrored in real time. That means that if you accidentally delete critical files from a project, they are deleted from the mirror as well.
2) I haven't worked with the WD MyBook before, so I couldn't tell you...
3) A RAID system will be completely transparent to the user. There are also incremental backup solutions that are fairly easy to use; once they are set up with a source and a target, they operate by themselves in the background or at pre-schedules off-times without disturbing the user.
4) You can actually use a tool like CarbonCopyCloner to create a complete image of the startup volume. You then scan this image for Software Restore with Disk Utility, and restore it onto the larger disk. This preserves everything, including software licenses and preferences, and makes migrating to the larger disk much easier. Caveats: You will need to install Mac OS X on a third disk (not the 80 GB one, and not the target 250 GB one) that has enough space for the disk image. This is the exact procedure I followed when I upgraded the internal 2.5'' Hard Drive in my PowerBook 12'' Aluminum. I had Mac OS X installed on a FireWire external drive, and used that to perform the transfer.

If your friend is really serious about backups, here are some things to consider:

•*RAID protects only from hardware failure, not user error. Because RAID sets update in real-time, accidental changes or deletions are propagated through the array immediately, and irreversably. Incremental backup solutions are the way to go to prevent you from accidentally deleting critical information. RAID is really applied for high availability -- when you need to have data always online, all of the time even through a hard disk failure.
•*Do not rely on just a single backup. Multiple backups stored on multiple mediums. Backup to the external disk, but if you have a dual layer DVD burner, use it to create a second set of backup disks every so often. If you have a firewire-based digital video camera, you can actually use it to create digital tape backups. Keep one set of backups on site, and another set of backups off-site. This will protect your data against environmental disasters. If there is a flood or fire, you don't want your all of your backups getting wiped out along with the working set.
 
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