Comments on: Another Hard Drive Dies

By: lapsed.cannibal

lapsed.cannibal — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 21:52:06 +0000

Thanks for the tips, all — I’ll check all that stuff out — Drobo and the Terrastation in particular, both of which seem very cool. Though the Terrastation is a little scary — it looks like it’s getting ready to unfold into a angry giant robot from the 50s.

By: Joachim Bengtsson

Joachim Bengtsson — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:00:05 +0000

Z: Don't you need identical drives to be able to hotswap? The cool thing about a Drobo or a ZRAID setup is that you can just replace a drive with a bigger one and thus basically never having to reformat.

By: Z

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 20:34:15 +0000

I actually just caved and bought a TeraStation Pro II. A whole 2TB at, that running RAID5 (loss of 25% of data capacity). Of course you don’t need the rack mount version (I had to have it; just because I could use bolts to hang it up), but a wonderful product. So, I can loose a hot swappable drive without loosing data. I then hung two old USB drives off its two USB ports and have it doing automatic backups via its web-based software. Priceless.

By: Joachim Bengtsson

Joachim Bengtsson — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:28:14 +0000

Time Machine over wifi is probably the one thing you need, the rest is just redundancy.

Skip .Mac. It's all crap, both from experience and from what I've read and heard. You don't need automated wireless backups with .Mac -- you have Time Machine for that.

If you commit automatically, you will be committing broken code without commit messages. I'd recommend against that :P Just get into the habit of committing for every atomic thing you implement, like for every complete step of a feature as long as it leaves trunk in a usable state.

Get a Drobo for archival. It's redundant so you won't lose anything if a disk fails; you just have to copy the file over so it's not at tedious as burning CDs and keeping either very good labels or very good indices; it's spotlighted so finding the files later will be a piece of cake; and it's basically infinitely large (since you can swap disks for bigger ones while it's running) so it'll hold everything you throw at it. I use a drobo for movies and archives; I have basically every file I've ever created since the eighties in one big spotlighted blob :)

And SD! backups might be useful, but TM'll probably keep you safe anyhow :)

By: Carlo Zottmann

Carlo Zottmann — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 17:32:46 +0000

Actually, step 5 can be automated. SuperDuper can be scheduled to run automatically.

I do this as well; I have an USB harddrive for that reason, which is usually turned off. SD is scheduled to run every Friday at 16:00, so I've set up an iCal reminder that hits me each Friday at 15:45 w/ a sticky, high priority, red flashing reminder to turn on the drive.

It's working really fine.

If you want more info, you have my contact details. :)

Cheers, Carlo