NikonGear'23
Gear Talk => Other => Topic started by: Jack of all trades on March 29, 2020, 22:30:01
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I have an IoSafe for normal backup that appears to be failing. I also periodically back up on a G-Force that I keep off-premises. The IoSafe has been backing up every hour for several years. Any recommendations for a reliable replacement? Thank you.
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For the last two years I have been using a 4GB La Cie hard drive split into two 2GB drives one as a time machine drive and one as a general HD very successfully with no problems!
I also use a small G drive to back up my photos in addition!
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For the last two years I have been using a 4GB La Cie hard drive split into two 2GB drives one as a time machine drive and one as a general HD very successfully with no problems!
I also use a small G drive to back up my photos in addition!
Gigabyte? Maybe Terrabyte, Mike!
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Iuse (have used) several LaCie drive without problems. The one G-force I used failed so I'll stick with LaCie.
Mike; it's wise to make a separate backup of your photo's. However splitting a drive between Time Machine and general backup is a risk, if that one disk fails you lose both your Time Machine and general backup. Better use separate (multiple) disks for dedicated tasks.
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It cannot be stressed enough that the only "reliable" hard drive is one not in use. Meaning every time the drive is spinning and reading or writing data, it can - and eventually will - crash. Bearings might dry out and lock up on non-used drives so there is always a finite life span associated with them. SSDs have no spinning parts but wear out nonetheless due to the finite number their memory cells can be rewritten.
The remedy is acting like you never trust a particular drive. Thus having several separate drives, RAID layouts, or whatnot. I have had loads of disks crashing over the years yet lost very little data and then mainly by human errors during the restore of data. The latter is hard to defend against unless you could clone yourself?
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Iuse (have used) several LaCie drive without problems. The one G-force I used failed so I'll stick with LaCie.
Mike; it's wise to make a separate backup of your photo's. However splitting a drive between Time Machine and general backup is a risk, if that one disk fails you lose both your Time Machine and general backup. Better use separate (multiple) disks for dedicated tasks.
Luc, that is what the G drive is for! I don’t power it up until I need to use it!
The La Cie drive is not meant to be a moveable drive, but was bought as a replacement for a failed Apple Time Capsule!. The trouble is that electronic device can fail, so where do you draw the line?
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Gigabyte? Maybe Terrabyte, Mike!
Fons, yes of course Terabytes not Gigabytes, silly me!
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Always do backups to more than a single media (whether that is a another hard drive, RAID system, tape etc.). A distributed risk is always the better approach.
Many protest and state this is simply too much overhead and work. Perhaps, perhaps not. Just pull the plug on the hard drive in your machine and learn what you have left of all your work. Probably very little if at all, unless the drive can be restored. For the latter purpose, backups (which are current) are indispensable.
You might do the exercise mentally so as not to physically destroy the drive. Just pretend your disk drive no longer exists. Lessons like this are invaluable if you follow up before your drive(s) actually crash. Not afterwards.
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I had a horror story this January.
My main data drive failed.
But I had two backups, one on a separate Time Machine drive and the other a separate hard drive with an up to date clone of my main data drive.
Then I discovered that my Time Machine drive had not made any backup since May last year. I think this was user error, as I had turned off backups for a good reason and forgot to turn them back on.
Then I discovered that my clone drive would not work. From having three versions of everything I suddenly had one version of some things and no version of other things.
Fortunately a local repair shop was able to extract the data from the clone drive and copy it to a new hard drive.
So all is well and I have replaced all my external hard drives.
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I keep all my old hard drives when I retire them. This proved to be useful recently when I discovered some photos from 2013 had corrupted.
My current backups of those photos were also corrupted, as were those photos on some earlier drives. So the corruption must have happened some years ago, and every time I was backing up I was backing up corruption.
Fortunately I had the original hard drive and was able to recover the uncorrupted photos from that. So the original drive found new life as a backup!
So many things can go wrong in the world of computers.
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After using local backup solutions for a long time, I am now keeping my photos in the cloud (iCloud), so no more hassle with timely backups.
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Always do backups to more than a single media (whether that is a another hard drive, RAID system, tape etc.). A distributed risk is always the better approach.
Many protest and state this is simply too much overhead and work. Perhaps, perhaps not. Just pull the plug on the hard drive in your machine and learn what you have left of all your work. Probably very little if at all, unless the drive can be restored. For the latter purpose, backups (which are current) are indispensable.
You might do the exercise mentally so as not to physically destroy the drive. Just pretend your disk drive no longer exists. Lessons like this are invaluable if you follow up before your drive(s) actually crash. Not afterwards.
I agree with Birna, and the mental exercise is a good idea. I started working in IT in the late 70's when the maximum capacity we worked with were 20mb (no typo) disks and disk capacity was so expensive we used hexadecimal compressed storage. Backup was done on large tape drives. Of course the disks and tapes were prone to fail, as we learned the hard way. Yet we never lost vital data thanks to an extensive backup schedule. I guess that's why I'm kind of OCD about backups. Multiple backups of the same data is a must if you value your data. Also consider what the consequences are if your house gets burglarised and your computer plus backup drives are stolen. My advice, also keep a recent backup outside your house e.g. at work or with family.
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After using local backup solutions for a long time, I am now keeping my photos in the cloud (iCloud), so no more hassle with timely backups.
I use Jottacloud in addition to NAS with RAID and local HD backup.
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I use Jottacloud in addition to NAS with RAID and local HD backup.
I do more or less the same:
1. copy card to "inbox"
2. ingest into catalog, copies to main HDD RAID
3. backup nightly to NAS
4. backup constantly to Crashplan and Jottacloud (that's right, two cloud backups).
I'm Hans and I'm an IT nerd ;D
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I like the concept of "Crashplan" :) Planned contingencies ....
With today's SSD drives, the death of a drive is like a silent blow from a Cyberspace Deity without any warning. A failing HDD might make funny noises before it takes upon itself to die.
I surmise I'm a nerd as well. All those RAID-1/5/6/10 systems tell me something. A transnerd??
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I'm using a 6Tb LaCie D2 (still thunderbolt 2 tho) as my main backup, it has a 128Gb SSD as well.
Once a month I copy that one to two 6TB Toshiba HDD's, one of them is kept outside the house.
I would love to have cloud backup, but for an amateur it's too expensive for my taste.
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I have an IoSafe for normal backup that appears to be failing. I also periodically back up on a G-Force that I keep off-premises. The IoSafe has been backing up every hour for several years. Any recommendations for a reliable replacement? Thank you.
What sort of backup, files, TM (Tome Machine), bootable clone? What OS are you running? For bootable clones, the latest, MacOS 10.15, Catalina, requires an SSD, but TM backups should go to spinners (HDDs). If you're just backing up images, either type of drive will serve, and triple redundancy is not out of line.
I like to use external enclosures that allow me to hot swap drives at will. That allows me to copy drives and/or replace any that fail, at will, and continue to use the enclosure. I hate sealed enclosures that don't allow access and/pr replacement of the drive itself. It's less expensive to buy naked drives than it is to buy enclosures with the drive sealed inside, plus you get a much wider choice of drives to choose from.
Buying naked drives also eliminates the software that comes loaded on packaged drives in sealed enclosures. There is good software out there for backups, such as CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner), as well as other SW choices. The Mac has it's own TM backup software, and I would recommend a drive used for TM to be restricted tp TM exclusively due to the speed with which it can fill up the available drive space.
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Don’t forget the that Time Machine will overwrite the earliest backup with the latest backup! And of course you can restore a Mac from a TM backup!
It’s how I have populated a new iMac!
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I like the concept of "Crashplan" :) Planned contingencies ....
With today's SSD drives, the death of a drive is like a silent blow from a Cyberspace Deity without any warning. A failing HDD might make funny noises before it takes upon itself to die.
Jottacloud is a Norwegian company i believe, might be interesting (i choose it (via the Dutch Liveschijf company) to have my data also in a Eur data center). Also it is mucho faster than Crashplan (under 5TB backed up data).
I surmise I'm a nerd as well. All those RAID-1/5/6/10 systems tell me something. A transnerd??
;D ;D ;D
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Thanks to all of you for your insights. I appreciate it very much.
Best wishes from Jack Seaman
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For my MacBook Pro with a 500GB SSD I have two Samsung T5 SSD USB-C 3.1 drives of the same size, with SuperDuper I periodically make bootable backups so I can continue using the MBP when the internal SSD dies.
When I travel I take one of the super small T5 drives with me which is stored in a separate location whenever possible, usually it goes with me when the laptop stays behind in the car, camper, hotel, etc.
At home I have several mechanical drives of different ages and sizes where I keep 3 copies of all photos spread out in different locations. I do have iCloud for file backups but as I am connected to the World Wide Web over a 4G mobile connection my speed and data is rather limited and not suited for photo backup.
I recently noticed that one of my 1TB drives was starting to fail, luckily I could restore it but I don’t trust it anymore as my main photo backup drive and as it was approaching its max capacity it was time to move to something more current and bigger.
When checking all the drives of different ages it was apparent all of them had different power adapters and data interfaces, as I did not want to add yet another power brick or cable type into the mix I decided to “make” my own drive using a 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD in an Asus USB-C 3.2 1GB/s enclosure where the latter can be replaced in the future when new interfaces like USB 4 comes available on the market.
Initially I was looking for a Thunderbolt 3 enclosure to use the full 3400MB/s speed potential of the SSD on the MBP but I kept reading stories about them not working at all with my iPad Pro 12.9 2020 which is currently limited to 335MB/s import and 100 MB/s export speeds anyway, hopefully Apple will bring the speed to the max 1000MB/s of USB 3.2 in iPadOS 14.
Attached a photo of the inside of the Asus enclosure, solidly made of thick aluminum which together with the pre-installed thermal tape keeps the temperature at a maximum 45C even on hot summer days of 30C (like the past few days here) which prevents throttling of the SSD inside.