Back Up Issues
There are two categories of computer users. Those that have lost data, and those that will lose data.
Now that the dust is settling on my catastrophic hard drive failure, I'm assessing and reassessing my backup strategies. The good news is that I had one, the bad news is that I hadn't done it recently enough.
The last time I had backed up my hard drive was a few months ago. While I lost some music files, at least the majority of them were safe, as well as my images on a separate external drive.
The reason I wasn't more up to date is that it takes a considerable amount of time to shuffle gigabytes of data around. I use an external Western Digital USB 2.0 drive to back up the essentials. It uses a separate power supply, and can transfer at a sustained rate of about 1 GB/minute which still means that a 30 gig transfer takes upwards of one half an hour.
While flash memory drives are more convenient, when we're talking about these quantities of data, we're beyond the cute stuff, and the real dump trucks are necessary. However, after you lose a shred of data, it's easy to get a little paranoid, and wonder what if something happens to the external drive? In other words, what is backing up the backup?
I decided to make an additional copy on a more portable external USB drive. These drives are smaller, and more convenient, and their svelteness is based on that they are USB powered. This translates into no separate power supply and one less cord so they are far easier to connect and tote. However, convenience has a cost, and the transfer took just about twice as long as my AC powered USB drive. Still with some patience, it got the job done.
I think that a better strategy is to mount a second hard drive internally. This should avoid the USB bottleneck completely, and transfer at SATA speeds that should speed things up quite a bit. An external SATA, or eSATA, drive is a possibility, but for the time being the drives are scarce, and the ports are scarcer. We should also consider other more advanced options such as LAN based network attached storage (NAS), or even setting up the hard drives in a RAID array.
For now I'm going with two different external hard drives. If I can revive my old Samsung SATA hard drive, I'd like to mount it internally for even speedier transfers. Whatever you decide, my experience is clear: not backing anything up is simply not an option.
--Jonas
Now that the dust is settling on my catastrophic hard drive failure, I'm assessing and reassessing my backup strategies. The good news is that I had one, the bad news is that I hadn't done it recently enough.
The last time I had backed up my hard drive was a few months ago. While I lost some music files, at least the majority of them were safe, as well as my images on a separate external drive.
The reason I wasn't more up to date is that it takes a considerable amount of time to shuffle gigabytes of data around. I use an external Western Digital USB 2.0 drive to back up the essentials. It uses a separate power supply, and can transfer at a sustained rate of about 1 GB/minute which still means that a 30 gig transfer takes upwards of one half an hour.
While flash memory drives are more convenient, when we're talking about these quantities of data, we're beyond the cute stuff, and the real dump trucks are necessary. However, after you lose a shred of data, it's easy to get a little paranoid, and wonder what if something happens to the external drive? In other words, what is backing up the backup?
I decided to make an additional copy on a more portable external USB drive. These drives are smaller, and more convenient, and their svelteness is based on that they are USB powered. This translates into no separate power supply and one less cord so they are far easier to connect and tote. However, convenience has a cost, and the transfer took just about twice as long as my AC powered USB drive. Still with some patience, it got the job done.
I think that a better strategy is to mount a second hard drive internally. This should avoid the USB bottleneck completely, and transfer at SATA speeds that should speed things up quite a bit. An external SATA, or eSATA, drive is a possibility, but for the time being the drives are scarce, and the ports are scarcer. We should also consider other more advanced options such as LAN based network attached storage (NAS), or even setting up the hard drives in a RAID array.
For now I'm going with two different external hard drives. If I can revive my old Samsung SATA hard drive, I'd like to mount it internally for even speedier transfers. Whatever you decide, my experience is clear: not backing anything up is simply not an option.
--Jonas
posted by digitaldoc at 10:36 PM
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