Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Aren't You Scared To Store Files On A 500GB HD?

I

iphone3048

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 13, 2009
71
0
What I'm scared about is that I convert movies and music and so forth.
If I would to store all this stuff on a 500GB HD and it goes bad that what?
Do you guys who have alot of files on such large files not scared to loose everything if the HD goes bad?

Or do you back all that info on another large HD?
I have a 120GB SSD which I love. But I'm thinking I rather put back my 500GB HD so I can leave all my movies in there without worrying about running out of space.

How do you guys deal with this?
 
This is the general rule of thumb. If you think you have a good enough backup solution, one more backup wouldn't hurt.

I use a RAID 1 Array with a seperate offline backup. Simple, but effective for what I store.
 
I have an external drive with two partitions
1. Time machine
2. Carbon Copy Clone

Time Machine runs automatically
Carbon Copy Cloner clones my drive every night at 3:00 AM
 
Sounds like a plan, I will have to get another drive and save to that as well.
So far it seems like macs are pretty stable, haven't had to re-start my mbp in days!
 
iphone3048 said:
Sounds like a plan, I will have to get another drive and save to that as well.
So far it seems like macs are pretty stable, haven't had to re-start my mbp in days!
Click to expand...

DAYS lol I was amazed by that when I first got my Mac. I've literally had instances where months passed without a restart. It's a wonderful thing.
 
Dalton63841 said:
DAYS lol I was amazed by that when I first got my Mac. I've literally had instances where months passed without a restart. It's a wonderful thing.
Click to expand...

MONTHS?? That is sweat! I'm so glad I went the mac route. My first desktop was an apple YEARS ago. Than it messed up on me somehow and from there it's been losedows (shouldn't be WIN dows, LOL). I love the operation system on this thing, nice!
 
I have ALL of my DVDs ripped to hard drives...ie. MOVIES I, MOVIES II, MOVIES III...and so on....Then I have, for each, a backup on a separate hard drive...MOVIES I BACKUP, etc.

It can get expensive but isn't it worth protecting your valuable media files???

I will probably go to a RAID Array for the most important files before long...but I also have a Western Digital attached to my desktop, constantly updating, and, once a week, I backup to a Clickfree 750GB HD.
 
iphone3048 said:
MONTHS?? That is sweat! I'm so glad I went the mac route. My first desktop was an apple YEARS ago. Than it messed up on me somehow and from there it's been losedows (shouldn't be WIN dows, LOL). I love the operation system on this thing, nice!
Click to expand...

LOL Yep, all I do is sleep. Restarts are only for the system updates.

Also, Just to reiterate something that most people should already know, RAID is NOT a backup solution. RAID1/1/10 only prevent against hard drive failure. If you use a RAID you also need some form of external backup, for the case of file loss/corruption.
 
You could get a 500 gig SSD if you have some money to play with (like as much money as the actual computer costs) or you could get the OWC kit to put your 500 gig HDD in the optical bay, leaving two hard drives in your MBP. Obviously, most important information should be on the SSD, HDD and an alternative backup (flash mem, DVD, CD, Internet storage system, etc). Consumer HDDs have a lot of reliability issues, but once you go up to the starting professional grade storage solutions, you will get excellent reliability, speed and durability. The NT Guardian Max has great reviews and the hard drives manufactured by OWC are very good. With that said, most people who make HDD's make consumer/entry level, consumer/enthusiast level, and professional level. The link below is b/c I am not acquainted with other HDDs from other companies.

http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/firewire/
I know a lot of people using the Elite AL Pro and they all give them the thumbs up.
(the reason for Firewire HD's is because if you got it, use it!)




MacDawg said:
I have an external drive with two partitions
1. Time machine
2. Carbon Copy Clone

Time Machine runs automatically
Carbon Copy Cloner clones my drive every night at 3:00 AM
Click to expand...

x2, but at 7AM.
 
mulo said:
i have 2x 2TB drives with no backup, both have gone bad before, but i managed to rescue the data.
Click to expand...

And how long did it take? My last backup solution failed with 750GB of data. 3 weeks later I'm still working on getting it all back. In terms of downtime that is a train wreck.
 
I use a NAS box with 2 RE3's (2TB each) in RAID 1 (mirrored) for my storage. These are enterprise level disks, but are worth the extra money!
 
I have had a 500GB Maxtor go bad on me, costing me everything on the disk.
Vowed that would never happen again so now I have 2x 500GB (mirrored) plus a separate 500GB time machine drive.
It`s more expensive but like someone else said, how valuable is your data to you??

Backup, Backup the Backup, then Backup the Backup of the Backup. :)
 
Norton74 said:
I use a NAS box with 2 RE3's (2TB each) in RAID 1 (mirrored) for my storage. These are enterprise level disks, but are worth the extra money!
Click to expand...

Props for using enterprise level disks, wish I could afford them, but surely you have some method of backup in the case of file corruption. In a RAID1 array, if a file is corrupted on one disk, it is corrupted on every disk in the RAID.
 
MacDawg said:
I have an external drive with two partitions
1. Time machine
2. Carbon Copy Clone

Time Machine runs automatically
Carbon Copy Cloner clones my drive every night at 3:00 AM
Click to expand...

With due respect putting both backups on a single hard drive is a bad plan. If that drive crashes you have lost both backups. It's much wiser to put your backups on discrete drives.
 
MacDawg said:
I have an external drive with two partitions
1. Time machine
2. Carbon Copy Clone

Time Machine runs automatically
Carbon Copy Cloner clones my drive every night at 3:00 AM
Click to expand...

I do the same, except I use SuperDuper to a Firewire Iomega external HDD.
 
rkaufmann87 said:
With due respect putting both backups on a single hard drive is a bad plan. If that drive crashes you have lost both backups. It's much wiser to put your backups on discrete drives.
Click to expand...

I agree, but I have both backups for different reasons, not for redundancy
If the external goes bad, I have the internal drive
If the internal goes bad, I have the external drive
The likelihood that both go at the same time is slim to none and acceptable risk to me

To be even more secure, you should have a backup in another location in case of fire/theft etc

My backup plan is for catastrophic failure of one drive only
We all take risks, but my risk is far less than no backup at all ;)

FWIW, I do have another clone on a portable drive, but I don't update it as often
 
I have about 5 HDDs and 1 SSD.

I have one external HDD with time machine that does it automatically every hour.

I have ANOTHER (NOTE: I do not use the same HDD just in case it fails, I don't want to have all my eggs in one basket) that has a carbon copy clone on it THAT IS BOOTABLE. This HDD is a USB powered pocket drive that I take with me. In case of SSD failure, I can boot off this drive for an emergency as it is my SSD clone.

I then store important documents etc. in my 16GB free Dropbox account so I can access it anywhere. When I say important, I don't mean bank stuff, I just mean documents I use often.

I then have 2 other external HDD's and my optibay drive to store media etc. on.

I figure, I am relatively safe, pending a natural disaster that wipes all my drives out haha!

I have contemplated doing another carbon copy clone of my SSD on one of my other drives, which I will probably do next week or so... that will give me 3 FULL backups (two of which are bootable) if I needed it.

I use time machine to nab single files/folders that I find I need after I deleted or something... then I use the CCC backup as a full restore/bootable drive if I need it.

I'm not sure what else I can do to protect myself, but I make a living on my MBP (I work from home) so a failure of a HDD would be catastrophic for me.... so I do a little overkill.

In all reality having 1 backup is probably good enough.

Also note, I DO NOT have CCC remove files that are not in the same directly as the SSD when it clones.... this way I can use my external USB pocket drive to store media on as well when I go places. Mostly I use it to transfer stuff from my machine to clients machines instead of a jump drive, as it holds MUCH more space. If I had remove things that are not in the same directory, it would remove my "OTHER" folder, which I use to transfer stuff from machine to machine.

My other external HDD I'm going to partition off and clone, making it remove things that are not duplicates so the partition will be a fully up to date clone... the other part of the partition will be media.

The more I sit and think, I'm halfway tempted to clone my externals to other externals hahaha... I'm SOOO afraid of failures. I had one once, without a proper backup, it crippled me and my business for over a week... was one of the worst times in my LIFE! haha.
 
Last edited:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148a Safari/6533.18.5)

Drives are pretty cheap get a couple 1TB drives and make backups!
 
Dalton63841 said:
I thought Dropbox limited the free account to a max of like 8GB? Is that wrong? Or a new thing maybe?
Click to expand...

If you can come up with a .edu email, you can get 16GB free from dropbox ;)

I'm not a student, but was able to use one ;)

HINT: doesn't even need to be an active email address ;)
 
Erm:confused: I use a thing called Time Machine and Time Capsule :confused: Surely your not serious in your question? With a Mac it's dead so so so so simple to backup you never need to worry.
My data on two totally separate drives and devices is good enough.
 
apolloa said:
Erm:confused: I use a thing called Time Machine and Time Capsule :confused: Surely your not serious in your question? With a Mac it's dead so so so so simple to backup you never need to worry.
My data on two totally separate drives and devices is good enough.
Click to expand...

And to prove some of us don't feel that safe ;)

This thread has talked me into creating ANOTHER CCC backup... I'm partitioning one of my 2TB externals (that currently does not have a backup on it) and putting my 3rd backup (CCC) onto it ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back