Monday, March 10, 2008

Did you back up your data today?

My laptop disk died on Friday.
Although this is a sad occurrence, I was very pleased to find out that my backup was in good shape, and I was back in working conditions 30 minutes after the accident.
I don't regret buying a 2 TB firewire hard disk.

That made a huge difference. Last time that I had a breakout, restoring 50GB from a USB external disk took about 5 hours. Transferring the same amount of data through a firewire interface takes now less than 25 minutes. I love technology!

5 comments:

andrew.johnstone said...

One lesson learnt, never store too much data in one location, I stored 500 gig whilst shifting data around and lost the lot after knocking the lacie disks slightly, then 2 days later my 1 gig thumb drive went and then a 160gb hd disk went...

My biggest mistake of all was storing too much data on a 1 tb disk (which was quite important), its sickening when you lose something like that and especially in the space of 1 week.

Unknown said...

So what hardware did you pick to do this with? Any regrets? What would you buy today?

Giuseppe Maxia said...

Brian,
I bought a LaCie Biggest Quadra, a 2 TB external disk array with FireWire 800 and FireWire 400 access.
No regrets. It's serving me well. I am backing up two Macs and one Linux server without problems.

Unknown said...

What software do you use for making those backups?

Giuseppe Maxia said...

FMPwizard,
for my backups I use a mix of built-in software (Apple time machine) and a customized rsync of my most valuable documents to a Linux server and to the disk storage.

Giuseppe