I’m thinking about making this “help Dan buy” thing a regular feature. Why? Because I’m in need of help. Last time, it was an LCD monitor (which, no, I still haven’t bought), now, a backup solution.
It’s not that I don’t have any backups in place; it’s more that I’m looking for a better way of handling them. At the moment, I backup my critical documents on my iDisk, but I have a fair amount of video, music, and pictures that also needs to be backed up. In the past, I’d been using a second internal hard drive in my B&W tower, but as that’s only 40GB to my primary drive’s 120GB, it’s no longer sufficient. Plus, with Leopard coming up, I’d like to invest in something that’s going to handle Time Machine.
A FireWire drive was my natural first thought; I’d probably roll my own, since I can snag a cheap big drive and an enclosure for less than a pre-packaged solution. But I’d really love to put a SATA drive in, and FireWire SATA enclosures are still kind of pricey and targeted towards RAIDs (USB2.0 are more common). I could invest in eSATA, but that would require expansion cards and such.
I really like the idea of a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device, i.e. an external hard drive accessed over the network. I have three computers—being able to backup info from all of them would be convenient. Still, it seems like that might be more expensive and slower than a FireWire solution.
What say you, MacUser readers? What are you running for a backup solution (all 4% of you)?
first we need to know exactly how many gigs you need to backup. are we talking 100, 500, 1 TB??? this is important before being able to recommend something.
what you don't need for a backup solution is eSATA. you're throwing more money at that. eSATA is great for external working drives. for backup drives its simply overkill. you need to understand that ideally you'll be backing up every day. hopefully once a day is best. usually just set it to automatically backup at like 3am, or whenever you're asleep and all it does is update the changes that have been made. the initial backup takes a while but each subsequant update takes maybe 10 minutes max.
one of the best little programs out there is SuperDuper! by shirtpocket, but i bet you already knew that. :)
I just recently purchased a 250GB OWC Mercury Elite-AL for my backups. It has both FW 400 and USB connections. I'll only be using it for backing up my MacBook Pro and an iBook, so 250GB is more than enough. I plan to use SuperDuper! as well and partition the hard drive so that each notebook has its own space. I wanted a solution I could boot from in the event I lost the entire drive on the notebook, and this seemed like a good fit.
The drive should arrive today, so with any luck, I'll spend some time playing around with it tonight.
The connection, be it FW, USB, ether, etc. will ultimately be your bottleneck. Keep that in mind when looking at the different drive solutions. There's not much sense in spending money on something which is capable of transferring data faster than your connection.
I have a USB 2.0/Firewire ATA/100 enclosure (http://www.amazon.com/Firewire-Aluminum-Enclosure-3-5-Inch-Drive/dp/B0000B3ALF/sr=8-1/qid=1160068735/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-2692426-4082332?ie=UTF8&s=electronics), and a Seagate 200 GB drive. All from Amazon, for under $165. To me SATA is only nessasary if you need a drive for frequently reading and writing things from, like a RAID 1 or a scratch disk. Linksys makes a device for attaching USB 2.0 drives to and then putting them on a network (http://www.amazon.com/Linksys-Storage-Disk-Drives-NSLU2/dp/B0001FSCZO/sr=8-1/qid=1160068959/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-2692426-4082332?ie=UTF8&s=electronics). Buffalo also makes good NAS drives. If you want to go SATA, get your own drive and enclosure, which is cheaper than buying an enclosure with the drive already installed.
I like rolling my own Firewire drives. You can get really huge drives cheap (I usually scout dealnews). I like OWC and Macally's drive enclosure offerings, but I do have issues with overheating because the enclosures have no fans and the Maxtor drives I chose are apparently very warm.
I've been eyeing OWC's Quad interface SATA drive enclosures. It's pricey, but I think will have the most long term viability and it looks great. The eSATA will be a really good thing to have if Time Machine turns out to be disk intensive.
A word about NAS drives. I think they're great for document backup, but for system backup, they suck wind and I'd hate to have to reinstall the whole system before I could get up and running again.
again, without knowing how much you need to backup, its hard to recommend a specific solution. more info please. :)
if you have 750 gigs or less to backup, pickup a seagate 750 drive and plop it into one of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817145657
its got a nice little fan so it will keep your drive nice and cool. i honestly don't know why anyone would bother with shelling out more money for eSATA for backup drives. its throwing money where you don't need to. just a foolish waste of money.
keep it simple. this rule works for everything in life.
What about software? I have plenty of NAS space, is there a decent backup software package?
I recently bought a Western Digital My Book Premium external drive (Firewire 400 and USB 2). Yes, you can find cheaper solutions, but the key word is cheaper, as in lower quality, bad esthetic design, etc. The My Book feels very well made, and runs very quiet. WD also just released a 1 TB external (2 500 Gig disks in RAID config) for those that are really serious about backups.
I do a monthly backup to the drive by booting my powerbook from it (the My Book has a basic install of 10.4 for this purpose) and then running Disk Utility and creating an image from the Powerbooks internal drive. This does a block copy of the drive, which is about 3-4 times faster than doing a regular file copy in the finder (This is also why I need to boot from the other drive). It makes a complete image of the internal disk that I can restore using a similar process. (Disk Utility has a specific tab named Restore designed for this.)Highly recommend this approach. Just don't select the compressed image option - this will take considerably longer, and won't save all that much space. I just set this up to run overnight once a month, and I've been extremely happy with how it has worked.
500GB from DealMac for under $200:
http://dealmac.com/deals/Maxtor-Diamond-Max-11-500-GB-IDE-Internal-Hard-Drive-for-180/135075.html?ref=rss_dealmac_20
That and an enclosure, and you're set.
I had a bad experience rolling my own drive using an ADS Pyro firewire encolsure 2 years ago. I am sure it is probably just a faulty enclosure, but it's no longer an inexpensive solution.
For my backup strategy, I mainly use two separate drives. A larger drive holds quick backups, which retain their folder hierarchy in a new folder (e.g. ~/Projects/Customer 1/Documents/ is dragged to Big Drive/Backups/2006/10-06/)
The 2nd drive is an older 120GB WD FireWire drive that I use with SuperDuper! to create a full, bootable image. I do this every two months.
I only plug these drives into the MacBook when I truly need them, and only one at a time, especially if I am SuperDupering.
I will constantly backup the files I am working with (e.g. a presentation or a document) by copying them to .Mac, GMail, or USB key. The key to this strategy is to organize your project files accordingly.
I use Apple's Backup to copy important things like Keychain, Address Book, iCal every week or so, but I synchronize with my devices constantly. My iPod stores a copy of all my music, and I use Backup to copy my photo library to DVD every few months.
Oh, one last tip. If you by some reason you need to get to a file from a public computer, create another e-mail account with GMail, Hotmail, or Yahoo. Then just be sure to send the entire set of files you think you will need to that new account. I just don't like the idea of accessing my main e-mail using a public Windows computer, and most of these public computers do not allow for CD or USB key access.
Stick with FireWire, Dan. As others have said, SATA is wasted on personal backups. And most NAS drives are slower than FireWire -- not to mention that most don't support HFS Plus, which can give you problems if you're trying to create a bootable clone.
As I said in the article, I'm looking to backup a 120GB primary drive (which, of course, may get larger in the future). My understanding of Time Machine is that it will require more than a 1:1 ratio of disk space, so I'll need a drive that's larger than that.
I don't know if we have any info on how Time Machine deals with partitions, but that's a possibility if I want to use it to backup multiple computers (my desktop and my MacBook, for example). But it looks like external FireWire is the way to go for now. I'll be looking into it. Thanks everybody.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817145167
Probably not what you're looking for, but I'm just putting it out there.
You can get a nice 320GB SATA drive for that for $90-some
The best NAS drive is a firewire drive connected to a networked Mac.
Once you've got that set up, rsync is a fast, reliable way to backup. Surprisingly easy to set up.
that's it? 120 gigs? that's nothing. eSATA and NAS is a waste of time and money. buy a cheap external firewire enclosure enclosure and get a cheap 500 gig drive. pickup superduper! and you're done. putting any more thought into it is a waste of time unless you want to backup from additional computers, which said you would like, but then you also said you only want to backup 120 gigs..... sooo.... which is it? 120 gigs or more??
Dan (M) said he was going to use Time Machine, which will likely chew through as much space as you give it and if you want a significantly long history backed up, you'll need a big drive.
Dan (F) may be right to recommend Firewire, but I personally always try to look forward. Maybe he has a better idea of what Time Machine might consume in resources.
1. I'm using a ministack with a 300GB drive as my mini's main boot drive, and I clone this more or less daily to my mini's original HD (using SuperDuper).
2. I also do a daily backup of critical work files on a separate partition on the boot drive using Apple's Backup.app. Backup.app also takes care of a weekly system preferences backup to my iDisk.
And finally, I do a weekly backup of Mail.app, Pictures folder, critical work files and system prefs to my iPod using iBackup.
I figure with various backups in four places (including one I have with me all the time) using three different apps, I should be covered. God forbid I ever have to use them, but if I do, I'll certainly be in better shape than the last time... (i.e., when I was a 96 percenter).
If you are going to roll your own, then SATA into a Firewire enclosure is pretty cheap. I got a 500gig Seagate at Fry's for cheap, then a FW400/USB2 external enclosure for $30 from TigerDirect. Works great.
BTW, weekly, I upload my Address (both Address Book and Entourage), bookmarks and other muy importante info to my GMail account using GDisk.
My hardware might perish in a fire, but 15 years of info will live on for free.
I have three computers to back up: My primary which is an iMac; my wife's Dell laptop; and an old Power G4 I use as a server for various things.
I also have an old iBook g4 with a dead LCD, so I picked up a KVM to run off the PowerMac's monitor (but now I use VNC to access it and hardly use the monitor), installed Retrospect, and plopped a 400GB OWC Netpune drive on it.
Honestly, drives for unattended backup don't have to that.
The backups go off every night at 1 am; and every month the backups recycle and we do a full backup over the weekend.
(I also have an older OWC Neptune 100GB attached to my iMac that I've recently cleared off in anticipation of using it for Time Machine.)
Anyway, the 400GB is more than enough, even with gigabyte upon gigabyte of music, videos, and everything else and this way I can tell it to back up everything: apps, system files, prefs, documents, the whole kit-n-kaboodle.
Because it runs unattended, I never even notice it doing its thing.
Retrospect (the regular version, not Express) and a couple of clients isn't cheap, but it's cheaper than eSATA and NAS drives, I think.
I back up a G4 mini to partition 1 of a FW Lacie Mini 250gb. The other partition I use as a media drive to store flix, pix and tunes.
I also have a lacie D2 320gb USB/FW/FW800 interface with 3 partitions. 1 is for a second backup of the G4 mini but one Tiger OSX update back. 2 is for a backup of the media drive. 3 is a PC FAT32 for work laptop backup files and file swapping to PC.
Oh, and I have another FAT32 drive stored securely offsite where my most important stuff is saved to quarterly.
All the above is done regularly via SuperDuper, except the PC stuff. I have had excellent results but am told the redundancy borders on paranoia. Recognizing you may need more space in Leopard, adjust drive sizes accordingly. The backup hardware was purchased piecemeal over time as needed. All could be purchased new today for under $350.
Time Machine actually doesn't use up more than a 1:1 - what it does is creates the base backup the first time you back up your data, then for each subsequent backup it creates aliases pointing to the original data then backs up the new data you've put on since the initial one. If you're working within Time Machine it's great. The problem is when you want to get to the files yourself and you have to dig through all the aliases only to realize that it also aliases applications - that is, it basically unpacks the .app files into the "Contents" etc. folders, rendering the application useless if you want to just grab it straight off the drive.