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Can I connect two of these drives to make exact copies of each other?

P

pilotkid

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Aug 22, 2006
1,009
214
Chandler, AZ
Hello all. I just bought a G-Tech 1TB G-Drive and I'm wondering if I bought another one and plugged the second one into one of the firewire 800 ports on the back of the drive will they make exact copies of each other, or do you have to have special hard drives for that? I have my Lightroom 5 catalog on it and I'm wanting a little big of redundency since I don't keep a copy of my catalog on my MBP's internal drive.
Thanks for your help in advance!
 
pilotkid said:
Hello all. I just bought a G-Tech 1TB G-Drive and I'm wondering if I bought another one and plugged the second one into one of the firewire 800 ports on the back of the drive will they make exact copies of each other, or do you have to have special hard drives for that? I have my Lightroom 5 catalog on it and I'm wanting a little big of redundency since I don't keep a copy of my catalog on my MBP's internal drive.
Thanks for your help in advance!
Click to expand...

Best to connect both to the MBP and mirror one to the other IMO.
 
You cannot connect drives directly and copy. You need a computer to do that for you.

When I want to clone one drive to another I use the Carbon Copy Cloner application, there are others. It used to be free, I think the trial version is still free. http://www.bombich.com/index.html download and try it, see if its simple enough for you.

CCC can do a lot of things from making an exact clone of a drive to routinely copying new files from the working drive to the backup drive.

You connect the drives to your computer however you want, firewire can daisy chain drives... but you don't have to do it that way.
 
ColdCase said:
You cannot connect drives directly and copy. You need a computer to do that for you.
Click to expand...

Yes, but sometimes the computer is in the enclosure. I'm using a Japanese-made twin drive USB 3 dock/cradle that also supports independent cloning.

Here's a similar device at Amazon.com. I haven't had the need yet for the cloning function, but it looks quite handy. It functions perfectly well as a dual-drive USB3 enclosure when not in clone mode.

Sorry, not Firewire but I just wanted to point out you don't always need a host computer. :)
 
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Assuming you connect both HDD to your Mac. The "Mirrored RAID Set" in "disk utility" should do everything automatically for you..

Screen Shot 2014-05-15 at 8.24.31.png

In case one of your HDD is broken. The remaining one should contain all the data and can work with your Mac as a normal single HDD.
 
Last edited:
The -easiest- way to do this:

1. Connect both drives to the Mac

2. Be sure the "target" drive is initialized and ready

3. Use CarbonCopyCloner to clone the contents of the source drive to the target drive.

4. Done !!
 
I run both LR and Aperture. The LR catalog and Aperture library sit in my internal SSD's Pictures folder. The raw originals/masters site on my LaCie external drive's Pictures folder. The LR catalog backups and the Aperture Vault (library backup) are also on the LaCie external drive. Both the internal SSD and external LaCie drives are backed up by Time Machine to a Time Capsule.

This approach gives me lots of redundancy and backup. Also I do not eat up SSD space inside my rMBP on backups. So I have max room during a photo field trip to collect new photos onto the SSD for processing. Once culled and edited, the finished photos are moved to the LaCie libraries.
 
MCAsan said:
Both the internal SSD and external LaCie drives are backed up by Time Machine to a Time Capsule..
Click to expand...

Yes, I personally choose to use time machine as well. For me, one backup every hour is good enough.

But that's not what he looking for. He want 2 HDDs make exact copy of each other. That's exactly what RAID 1 does. All change you've made will write into both HDD at the same time. And either HDD is the backup of the others in real time.

However, If you delete any files, those file will be remove from BOTH HDD as well. Therefore, RAID 1 only protect you from HDD failure. And it's still a good idea to use time machine to protect the user from human error.

I'd simulate his case by using 1 USB stick + 1 SD card. I RAID them together. It works exactly as I expected. No matter which device I eject, the remaining one still works with all data on it. No recover required. So, no need to wait for the files to recover (like time machine).
 
Fully understood. My LaCie 2Big 6TB is running in RAID 1 for 3TB mirrored. RAID 1 is not for backup. It gives you a higher availability in case one drive dies.

If OP wants to run two identical drives as a RAID 1 volume, no problem. Just don't forget that high availability is NOT the same as backup.

My Aperture library and LR catalog are both on the internal SSD, on each of the two RAID 1 drives, and backed up to my Time Capsule. If I were a pro and the files were mission critical, I would also do cloud storage and offsite drives in a bank vault (or similar secure off site location).

Each photographer has to decide how important the files are to their hobby or business and make the budgetary decision on why backup strategies make sense to them.
 
Thank you so much for all the replies. Its really helped a lot. I'm going to try a few choices that you all have given me and see which one works best for me. Thanks agin.
 
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