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July 1, 2008

tips

Back that drive up. (Seriously.)

Posted Jul. 1, ’08, 9:59 AM PT by Cyrus Farivar
Category | Tips

spindle.jpgSo Chris Breen’s recent experience with fires down in the Santa Cruz area got me thinking about my backup strategy.

Until I got a new MacBook earlier this year with Time Machine, I was backing up across my network to my in-house media server (really, just a G4 Tower with a bunch of hard drives in it) using Retrospect. Given that I do a lot of freelance radio work and am working on a book, a lot of my large audio files are stored over there. I have one drive that serves as a repository that then gets copied to another drive within the tower, as well. I have hours and hours of interviews in WAV files and many text files of notes to go with them.

However, when I went to copy some of the files over to my MacBook, I discovered that my audio and text files for my book — all of them — were corrupted. These are irreplaceable files of interviews done during weeks of overseas travel over a year ago. The audio files wouldn’t open in anything (I kept getting OSStatus error -208 — anyone ever seen this?) and the text files were just gibberish. After a few hours of panicking, I discovered an old backup file that I still had on a random drive from November 2007 and that did have uncorrupted data on it. (I also have an off-site backup, a set of DVD-RWs that get overwritten every month or so, that I keep in my car, but the data on those was corrupted too, as it had made a backup of bad data.)

So the lesson here is, check your backups periodically — and when possible, check to make sure that your backups are working properly. And make backups of the backups. Rinse, lather, repeat.


4 Comments

Chris said:

We're honestly at a tipping point in storage. With video files becoming a larger part of people's hard drives, the space is diminishing quickly.

I have a 500GB internal HD. I also have a 500GB external Firewire 400 HD. I use both for everyday items and both are over 60% full. Both drives back up to a 2TB Firewire 800 HD. But every once in a while I check my backups through Time Machine and they're corrupt. I'm not feeling terribly confident in Time Machine right now.

I also backup my iPhoto and Aperture libraries as well as my portfolio to a 250GB portable drive that I take with me everywhere. I still don't feel safe.

Something needs to be done about this and it needs to come soon. I don't know if that means a new, trustworthy compression that can squeeze massive amounts of data onto a DVD or what it means but I know something has to happen.

July 1, 2008 12:11 PM
Matt Author Profile Page said:

badFileFormat = -208, /*was not type AIFF or was of bad format, corrupt*/

It's a Sound Manager or similar error. It means that the system or a program though the file was of one format but, actually, it was not. Sound conversion utilities might be able to open it, but you might want to strip off the file type or filename extension first in case they're using that as a cue.

Try the "file" command-line tool, as in "file [your pathname here]". If it really is an AIFF file, the result will be something like "IFF data, AIFF audio."

July 1, 2008 3:46 PM
Kirk said:

I highly suspect that Retrospect is to blame since data on both drives and DVD-RW are messed up. Other backup apps like SuperDuper, Deja Vu, Carbon Copy Cloner, et al, all of which only makes a copy of files to another drive doesn't seem to have this problem.
My recommendation is to try another backup app and see if corruption still occurs.
I like the idea of being able to take my media, be it hard drive or DVD, anywhere and be able to simply copy files from it without the need for app that created the backup.

I know that back in the day, Retrospect was the king of the hill, and there wasn't a lot of apps to choose from. Now there is a lot of choice at cheaper prices that get the job done, even over the network. Ditch Retrospect!

July 2, 2008 3:54 AM

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