1033 replies to this topic

[mongo_jones]

depends on how much data you have. i have about 100 gigs in music files alone. the truth is your data will expand to fill available space. the more space i have, the more crap i download/rip to fill it.

[omnivorette]

I'm thinking perhaps I should get 2 external hard drives. One for music, photos and media, and one for backup (of system and everything else). I wouldn't back up the music/photos/media onto the backup drive, just let all that live on its own drive. So maybe one drive that's 100G for backup, and the 'media drive' that would be, say, 200 or 250G? Or is that unnecessary and too complicated?

[tanabutler]

I'm thinking perhaps I should get 2 external hard drives. One for music, photos and media, and one for backup (of system and everything else). I wouldn't back up the music/photos/media onto the backup drive, just let all that live on its own drive. So maybe one drive that's 100G for backup, and the 'media drive' that would be, say, 200 or 250G? Or is that unnecessary and too complicated?

That sounds very sensible, quantities included.

My ex uses a commercial program called Retrospect, which he has configured to do on a daily, to an external hard drive. He selects the folders to back-up: the default OS X folders that come configured on your hard drive are: Applications, Library (which is for preferences, fonts, etcetera), Photos, Movies, Music, Documents, and System. You will probably add folders, as I have: I back up my Design and Banking folders regularly, though I should probably be religious about it.

Here is a page with information on the various programs for OS X for backing up data.

One of the options is to use a .Mac membership ($99/year) to use your remote iDisk, a connected hard drive, or other locations. The simplicity of that has got to be worth the money. (I'm signing up for it ASAP.)

I wouldn't rely on lesser shareware programs to do the job properly. It's too important.

[TheMatt]

For occasional backups that need to exist and you have to be very sure they will exist, S3 is hard to beat. Since those servers are all over the planet and everything is spread on a massively redundant scale and is encrypted, it's hard to lose anything.

I think Jungle Disk is the de facto client on OS X and one of the biggies on XP.

Cost right now is $0.15 per GiB-month and $0.20 per GiB transferred (they are GiB, not GB as stated at Amazon's FAQ).

Note that ye olde Streamload can still be cheaper than S3, but it still has that 10 MB/file limit I think. iDisk can be horrifically more expensive unless you are transferring data almost continuously.

[omnivorette]

What is S3?

[TheMatt]

What is S3?

Oh, sorry, it was a big deal a while back I figured everyone got into it. S3 is Amazon's "Storage for the Internet" a la the GDisk everyone keeps thinking that Google will come out with.

It's essentially a web services interface that allows you to store data on Amazon servers that are spread out all over the world. When you upload to S3, the data is encrypted and then spread out on all those servers making it very hard to mess up. Jungle Disk is probably the best known app for accessing S3 (Amazon provided an API but it is very low-level).

It is very cheap to store on S3, $0.15 a GiB-month. Where it can get you is in the transfer fee. Amazon charges $0.20/GiB up or down. So if you need continual access to the data, S3 can kill you. But, if you just have files you need to make sure are there but don't need to access them all the time, S3 can be really cheap compared to other services.

[pim]

I'm thinking perhaps I should get 2 external hard drives. One for music, photos and media, and one for backup (of system and everything else). I wouldn't back up the music/photos/media onto the backup drive, just let all that live on its own drive. So maybe one drive that's 100G for backup, and the 'media drive' that would be, say, 200 or 250G? Or is that unnecessary and too complicated?

That'll drive you nuts having to connect to two external drives and remembering what goes into which. Get a big enough external drive to hold everything you'll need, get a good program to run automatic archive, plug it in at the end of the day and let the program do everything you need.

The .mac is great for when traveling, but the space it gives you is far too small to use it to, say, clone your harddrive. I put up my photo files etc while traveling and have no access to my usual backup system, but I wouldn't do it as my sole backup system.

[porkwah]

I'm thinking perhaps I should get 2 external hard drives. One for music, photos and media, and one for backup (of system and everything else). I wouldn't back up the music/photos/media onto the backup drive, just let all that live on its own drive. So maybe one drive that's 100G for backup, and the 'media drive' that would be, say, 200 or 250G? Or is that unnecessary and too complicated?

You could just get one 500G backup drive and put stuff in separate folders -- why would you get two separate drives?

[omnivorette]

Yeah - I was talked out of that. I guess I was thinking about safety in redundancy. But anyway, I'm getting a 300G external hard drive.

Probably this:

http://www.jr.com/JR...Product=4083526

[mcj]

If you're concerned about actual redundancy, as opposed to the separation of data & applications/system files, then just backup your files to the external hard drive as recommended above & create another backup by burning DVD-R/W's.

That reminds me, I have a folder for downloaded installation files - "Installers". They're replaced with updated versions, after the updates prove reliable. If the internal hard drive fails or would become corrupted, these files could also be lost and would be a pain to re-download... if one even knew what to download. My advice is to create such a folder and back it up to a CD-R/W or DVD-R/W in addition to the external hard drive, just like the backups for your other irreplaceable data, settings, etc.

[omnivorette]

So when I get this external drive (probably next week), first step is to back up my current PC completely. Any suggestions as to programs with which to do this?

I will also (god willing) pull what I need from this external drive back into the new MacBook...

[mcj]

Macs can read from & write to PC-formatted drives without difficulty, the same can't be said for PC's reading/writing on Mac-formatted drives. Probably the most elegant solution would be if the two machines were connected to a router (or directly to one another) via the ethernet interface. It's the fastest connection you'll get & the setup shouldn't be difficult — if using a router, the vast majority nowadays are configured via your internet browser and normally have a "wizard" of some kind to do most of the basics for you. (When using a direct connection, one of the machines takes a roll similar to that of the router.)

In either case, the other machine is seen as a networked hard drive (and access permissions must be given to the other machine first... Network Settings, that sort of stuff) so that you can quite simply copy folders over to the other system. No other software is required. In this manner, it's a breeze to copy Documents & Settings containing documents, pictures, music, etc. in a single command.

A backup hard drive could thus be connected to the network via one of these machines. Just leave it plugged-in to one system. On a Mac, as long as the external drive is powered-up, it'll automatically mount when the Mac is restarted or switched on. I'm not sure if that's the case with Windows. (When a drive is "Mounted", it's logical connection is established even though the physical connection wasn't broken. It's similar to plugging-in a USB device that's turned-off -> you're PC doesn't "see" it until you turn-on the device. That's when the device becomes mounted.)


If you plan to back-up your PC's hard drive on a regular basis, then it becomes necessary to get a program to perform the scheduled back-ups. Some will also check the files in the "marked" folders to determine if there are any changes, if not, then that folder/file doesn't need to be backed-up again, saving time.

[tanabutler]

Not for nothing are you an "advanced member," mcj. So helpful and so smart.

Macs can read from & write to PC-formatted drives without difficulty, the same can't be said for PC's reading/writing on Mac-formatted drives. Probably the most elegant solution would be if the two machines were connected to a router (or directly to one another) via the ethernet interface. It's the fastest connection you'll get & the setup shouldn't be difficult — if using a router, the vast majority nowadays are configured via your internet browser and normally have a "wizard" of some kind to do most of the basics for you. (When using a direct connection, one of the machines takes a roll similar to that of the router.)

In either case, the other machine is seen as a networked hard drive (and access permissions must be given to the other machine first... Network Settings, that sort of stuff) so that you can quite simply copy folders over to the other system. No other software is required. In this manner, it's a breeze to copy Documents & Settings containing documents, pictures, music, etc. in a single command.

A backup hard drive could thus be connected to the network via one of these machines. Just leave it plugged-in to one system. On a Mac, as long as the external drive is powered-up, it'll automatically mount when the Mac is restarted or switched on. I'm not sure if that's the case with Windows. (When a drive is "Mounted", it's logical connection is established even though the physical connection wasn't broken. It's similar to plugging-in a USB device that's turned-off -> you're PC doesn't "see" it until you turn-on the device. That's when the device becomes mounted.)


If you plan to back-up your PC's hard drive on a regular basis, then it becomes necessary to get a program to perform the scheduled back-ups. Some will also check the files in the "marked" folders to determine if there are any changes, if not, then that folder/file doesn't need to be backed-up again, saving time.

[TheMatt]

Macs can read from & write to PC-formatted drives without difficulty, the same can't be said for PC's reading/writing on Mac-formatted drives.

Actually, be careful with this statement. As far as I know, OS X without any outside help can only read/write FAT32 (and FAT12 and 16). I'm pretty sure that NTFS (the primary file system for Windows XP/2003) is still read-only.

I imagine, like HFS+ in Windows, a third-party utility is needed to write to an NTFS drive. And from past experience writing NTFS on a Linux box, beware this. It is pretty simple to h0rk NTFS writes is the utility isn't just right.

[mcj]

Not for nothing are you an "advanced member," mcj. So helpful and so smart.

Macs can read from & write to PC-formatted drives without difficulty, the same can't be said for PC's reading/writing on Mac-formatted drives.

Actually, be careful with this statement. As far as I know, OS X without any outside help can only read/write FAT32 (and FAT12 and 16). I'm pretty sure that NTFS (the primary file system for Windows XP/2003) is still read-only.

I imagine, like HFS+ in Windows, a third-party utility is needed to write to an NTFS drive. And from past experience writing NTFS on a Linux box, beware this. It is pretty simple to h0rk NTFS writes is the utility isn't just right.

Thanks for the catch regarding NTFS!

When I have a question about Mac OSX, I check out the "macosxhints Forum". Plugging NTFS into its' search bar resulted in 233 hits. Here's a thread about External Hard Drive Permissions.

I see from the GetInfo screen capture that you posted that your external USB disk is formatted with NTFS. This is a filesystem used by Windows. OS X can read this type of filesystem, but not write to it.

If you want to write files onto an external disk, it must be formatted with HFS+ format (the native format used by OS X) or FAT (an older format used by Windows).
To change the format of the disk will involve erasing the disk and thus losing all files currently on that disk. Note also that Windows machines cannot use disks formatted with HFS+ (unless you get special software for your Windows machine). So you need to decide how this disk will be used before you proceed.

[Highlight added by me.]

Since we're discussing a new drive, it looks like formatting it with the FAT format is the way to go in order to maximize its' compatibility with both systems. (Or get an Ethernet drive... but that's $$$!!!)