Backing up

[jwatkins1234]

Hi all,
I have a Macbook pro, I'm a photographer and I've purchased 2x external 4TB Thunderbolt G drives to relocate my all of my photos (around 1TB) to.

The plan was to copy all of the files on "drive 1" and then manually copy the day/week across onto "drive 2" on a regular basis so they would be a duplicate of each other as I had been advised that time machine would not be suitable.

However, I have looked into carbon copy cloner which seems like it would be a better option from manual. From what I have read; I can automatically schedule the back ups plus if I make changes to a set of images on "drive 1" then that will be reflected on "Drive 2" when it backs up.

Not sure if you need to know but:
MacBook Pro
15-inch, Late 2011
Memory 8 GB 1067 MHz DDR3
Software Mac OS X Lion 10.7.5 (11G63b)
Replaced original HD with a 1tb HybridSSD and replaced optical drive with original 500gb HD.

Advice would be great fully received as I am quickly running out of room!
Many thanks.

 

[maflynn]

I'd go with Carbon Copy Cloner as it creates a mirror image of your drive that is also bootable. Something that isn't really possible with just manually copying folders. Plus there are hidden folders that OS X uses that if you're looking to backup you'll need to be aware of them

 

[jwatkins1234]

CCC does seem to be the best way to go;
It will be just images and documents stored on the external drive so shouldn't need to be bootable.
Does it matter that the drives are the same size? as with time machine it is recommended that the back up is 2x the original?
Are there any alternative suggestions?

 

[MCAsan]

When I am out on a shoot, I collect all the raw images to my internal SSD. I have an external USB drive for doing Time Machine backups in the field.

When I get home I complete the culls and edits and move all the finished images from the SSD to the 6TB external library drive. This frees up my SSD space for the next photo shoot and/or field trip. The library set houses my photos, movies, documents, music....etc. Both the library set plus the internal SSD are backed up by Time Machine to a 6TB external drive.

Suggestions:

• Move to Mavericks for better memory management..etc.
• Make a bootable MA
• avericks USB stick just incase you every need to rebuild the main drive from scratch
• Setup the two TB drives as a RAID 1 (mirrored) pair for high availability. That lets you continue to work if one drive fails. Note this is NOT a substitute for proper backups
• Get a third drive, or use a Time Capsule with 4TB drive, to do Time Machine backups of the Macbook plus the RAID 0 set. There is no end of folks on this BBS who are not doing backups......and then losing all their data to some problem.

I hope of that helps. Good luck with your photography.

 

[thedeske]

However, I have looked into carbon copy cloner which seems like it would be a better option from manual. From what I have read; I can automatically schedule the back ups plus if I make changes to a set of images on "drive 1" then that will be reflected on "Drive 2" when it backs up.

Yep - Agree with the others. CCC and Super Duper are both good choices. They tend to bounce over each other with features, but CCC gets more updates these days. The smart update is very handy on the photo storage and system clones. Once you have the base volume, it's nice and quick.

Chronosync is another interesting option. Perhaps overload for most of us.

 

[ColdCase]

Because I'm a belt and suspenders type of guy I use both TM and CCC. I configure TM to use two destination disks, one local and one on a mini server. Time machine will automatically alternate backups from one to the other. This is enough for most but for disaster I have another two portable drives. I rotate them with one drive is off site and another local. I use CCC to backup my working storage daily (I configure CCC to only copy new files and archive the previous version). Every week or so I'll rotate the CCC disks. I also down size the priceless photos and FTP them to a web host server I rent from GoDaddy.

If one is concerned about always being able to recover images, these are the kinds of steps that seem prudent. If you have a lot of images and video that you use routinely, say more than 10TB, then an enterprise type solution may make more sense.

As mentioned, other techniques such as mirrored drives and RAIDs, are useful for minimizing down time due to a disk issue or for performance.