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acedickson

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 6, 2004
727
0
ATL
Bad news: My harddrive failed and I hadn't backed up my music since I've had the computer less than a month.

Good news: iTMS support let me re-download all the music I'd purchased. Go iTMS support!
 

Capt Underpants

macrumors 68030
Jul 23, 2003
2,862
3
Austin, Texas
I almost lost all of my music 2 weeks ago. I had noticed that my PB HD was making unusual noises, but kept procrastinating and not backing up my files. The morning after I decided to back up, my Powerbook wouldn't boot up. Now my PB's back from Apple, and I am so happy that I decided to back up. All of my pictures, home movies, and music was on that hard drive. Needless to say, I am lucky.

Glad iTMS let you redownload all of the songs you had already purchased. How many songs did you have?
 

acedickson

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 6, 2004
727
0
ATL
I'd bought 85 from them since I got the computer last month. They even let me redownload all of the songs I won from the Pepsi-iTunes promotion. In total it was 143 songs.

I'm extremely pleased with them. Now if only I hadn't lost the family pictures from the holidays. I'll have to get some pictures from my mom that she took to replace them. :(
 

Capt Underpants

macrumors 68030
Jul 23, 2003
2,862
3
Austin, Texas
acedickson said:
I'd bought 85 from them since I got the computer last month. They even let me redownload all of the songs I won from the Pepsi-iTunes promotion. In total it was 143 songs.

I'm extremely pleased with them. Now if only I hadn't lost the family pictures from the holidays. I'll have to get some pictures from my mom that she took to replace them. :(

That is such a bummer, man. I know my mom would have been devastated if we had lost our entire digital photo collection. I was lucky this time. Just get an external HD and back up every month. It's not the most fun thing to do, but it will save you hassles in the long run.

Best Wishes
 

Horrortaxi

macrumors 68020
Jul 6, 2003
2,240
0
Los Angeles
You were lucky. Back up your data regularly. The more important it is, the more you should back it up. Make backups of your backups.
 

Mechcozmo

macrumors 603
Jul 17, 2004
5,215
2
If you have two Macs you can use FireWire target disk mode to send files from one to the other... or you can connect them with FireWire and set them up to transfer over FireWire (share internet between them with FireWire) and backup are done it seconds. :D

Good to know that iTMS allows you to re-download lost music. They do warn you to back up your music.
 

feyd_ehway

macrumors regular
Mar 10, 2005
118
0
kcmo
Helpful backup tips?

Horrortaxi said:
You were lucky. Back up your data regularly. The more important it is, the more you should back it up. Make backups of your backups.
what is your recomendation for best way to back up files?
on dvd i suppose, but do you compress?(with what to what?)
how do you organize all of it?(duplicates and all) :confused:
-feyd
 

acedickson

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Dec 6, 2004
727
0
ATL
Horrortaxi said:
You were lucky. Back up your data regularly. The more important it is, the more you should back it up. Make backups of your backups.

I know, I know. I'm a computer tech and I was just too laxed. I only lost the brand new stuff from this new computer. I just got too smart for myself. Technology put me back in my place quickly, lol.
 

Horrortaxi

macrumors 68020
Jul 6, 2003
2,240
0
Los Angeles
feyd_ehway said:
what is your recomendation for best way to back up files?
on dvd i suppose, but do you compress?(with what to what?)
how do you organize all of it?(duplicates and all) :confused:
-feyd

There's no single answer to this. Everybody will have a slightly different approach so just find something that works for you. I think a good place to start is by organizing your data in some kind of orderly fashion and weeding out duplicate files, junk, etc as you go. How often you back up will depend on how much data you have and how screwed you'd be if it all went away suddenly. The format you back up to depends on what you've got available--though if your data is important enough you'll buy whatever you need to get the job done.

Here's what I do: My main computer is a G4 MDD. The OS and applications live on 1 hard drive, my home folder lives on another drive, and I have a 3rd drive for editing movies and other large projects. Once a week (usually Saturday morning) I drag my entire home folder to an external hard drive. Every couple months I burn my Documents folder to DVD and stash it at my mom's house. Lastly I use Backup to automatically save my bookmarks, keychain, calanders, address book, Quicken data, and other small but frequently changing and vital files to iDisk every night.

I have an iBook that I take to work. The contents tend not to change that much, but when they do I just sync the iBook to the G4 and stuff gets backed up off the G4 (and a copy stays on the iBook so there are in effect 3 copies of my work files).

We've got a G4 Cube that mostly gets used to hold music and stream it to the other computers/devices in the house. I recently went through the iTunes library and removed duplicates and did some other trickery to get the size down from 60GB to about 45GB. The whole library gets backed up to an external drive once a month unless I've been buying a lot of music in which case I'll back it up after my binge is over. Periodically I burn my ITMS purchased music to DVD and I make 2 copies. One goes into my closet with all my CDs and the other goes to my mom's house. In the event that the music on the Cube and my backup drive is lost I can re-encode from the original CDs and my DVD backup of ITMS stuff.

At work I manage 2 iMac DVs and a PowerMac 5400. I keep images of the drives so when one gets hosed (though the only 1 that has had problems so far is the 5400) I can restore the computers quickly.

I've never had a serious loss of data. A couple months ago the Cube wouldn't boot. I had to reinstall Jaguar on my G4 after the first 10.2.8 was released (anybody remember that first disasterous release?) and my iBook had the logic board and hard drive replaced last year. None of these were major problems in terms of losing data. I just had to spend a little time reinstalling software and restoring files from backup.

By the way, I've used Apple's Backup and Retrospect and wasn't impressed by either. They do incrimental backups, which is nice and they can do them automatically which is great (when it works) but I've found that simply dragging and dropping folders is a lot faster. It also gives you the added benefit of being able to access your backed up data directly. You don't need Retrospect, for instance, to open your backup file. Drag & drop is also free.

That was a much more verbose explanation than I expected to give. Thank you insomnia!
 

gekko513

macrumors 603
Oct 16, 2003
6,301
1
I use .Mac which comes with an application called Backup. This lets you automate backup procedures. So far I'm just backing up the most essential stuff to the iDisk (online storage) that is also included in the .Mac subscription.

Setting up Backup was easy, I just had to check or uncheck choices for which folders and settings I wanted to have backup of and then tell it when I wanted the backup to be done. I have set it up to do automatic backup at 13:00 every day while I'm at work. In the weekends I get to watch the backup procedure :cool: if I'm at my Mac at the time.

HorrorTaxi: How can dragging and dropping files be faster than using Backup? Backup takes up exactly 0 minutes and 0 seconds of my time every week.
 

indifference

macrumors regular
Sep 28, 2004
184
0
Pacific Northwest
I find it depends on what data you are backing up and how you are backing it up. When i think about it, for music, if you buy it through the store, apperently now you don't need to back it up. But for large files, I would back everything up. All data in data work should be backd up. It depeneds on the size of the file I think. If you are working with a lot of files, use DVD, they can store more files in one place. Now the question is it better to use DVD or DVDR, well that would depend on if you have a DVDR recorder.
 

Horrortaxi

macrumors 68020
Jul 6, 2003
2,240
0
Los Angeles
gekko513 said:
HorrorTaxi: How can dragging and dropping files be faster than using Backup? Backup takes up exactly 0 minutes and 0 seconds of my time every week.

0 minutes and 0 seconds, but my experience has been 0 reliability. Something always goes wrong--either the automatic backup doesn't take place or (more likely) it refuses to copy a certain file and the process grinds to a halt.
 

Applespider

macrumors G4
indifference said:
When i think about it, for music, if you buy it through the store, apperently now you don't need to back it up.

The iTMS reminds you regularly to backup your music. The support team letting you redownload is a 'favour' not a universal backup policy.

Personally, I back up to an external hard drive using SuperDuper every couple of weeks (which is hidden in the apartment) - and I have some other files on my iPod in the hopes that all 3 HDs wouldn't be lost/stolen/fail at the same time.
 

gekko513

macrumors 603
Oct 16, 2003
6,301
1
Horrortaxi said:
0 minutes and 0 seconds, but my experience has been 0 reliability. Something always goes wrong--either the automatic backup doesn't take place or (more likely) it refuses to copy a certain file and the process grinds to a halt.
OK, in that case I understand. I have none of those problems.
 

Mechcozmo

macrumors 603
Jul 17, 2004
5,215
2
FireWire target disk mode to the iMac. Drag n' Drop. I keep a list of applications that were on there so that I can quickly reinstall them. Most of them are already living on the iMac though.
 
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