This article is good. Read it. Do it. Now. Your life (or at least your data) depends on it.
I can’t count the number of times that I’ve seen people lose vital data to a dead hard drive, and it’s just as painful for me to have to tell them that it’s gone for good as it is for them to hear it. Yeah, there’s always the option of a data-recovery company, but most people can’t afford that, and they offer no guarantees even if you can.
Don’t subject your favorite computer nerd, or yourself, to that kind of torture. Back up your data, regularly and often. Please.
Time Machine is great, for that reason. It’s backup for the rest of us.
Time Machine is great for Macs, but most people don’t have Macs. Even for those who do, it’s only part of a solution. Read the full article, and maybe the one on Daring Fireball that it’s based on.
OK, read it. I’m not doing “off-site” at present, really because I don’t have any site to store stuff at present. I mean, maybe I could put hard drives in a locker at shul, but people might stare at me if I brought hard drives into a synagogue. 😉
I do the stuff with dropbox and USB drives though, and have Carbon Copy Cloner (like SuperDuper! but free without crippling and written by an Apple employee) also. I figure just the fact that I use Time Machine, USB drives, an iPod Classic for music files, and Dropbox, means I have a pretty good backup strategy, in spite of it not being industrial-strength.
Oh yeah, the author of the article uses Drobo. Not only are Drobos flaky according to their reputation, they format the hard drives in a proprietary fashion, which make them unable to be read by anything but a Drobo, which is a device made by a small, new, independent company who could leave you high and dry. Not a Good Plan.
I keep an off-site backup (I won’t say where), in addition to a Time Machine backup and a RAID-1 network-attached storage system. It’s not perfect, because I have to manually make the off-site copy every so often, but it’s pretty good.
I don’t use Dropbox or anything similar, personally. They sound great, but I’m paranoid — I don’t like storing my data on another company’s Internet-connected servers, even if it is encrypted there. And I’d need a heck of a lot of bandwidth to store all my digital stuff. Not worth it, personally.
I hadn’t heard about Drobo. It sounds interesting, though I can definitely see where it could cause some trouble.
Interesting, sure. RAID is interesting too, and doesn’t lock away your hard drives completely from other’s controllers like a proprietary and expensive solution.
The Drobos system is doing things that no standards-based system can. They have to use a proprietary solution. And yes, it probably is expensive — “all the market will bear” and all. If they can keep a business going that way, more power to them.
Yes, the only problem is they aren’t especially reliable, according to reviews. If that’s the case, that, in combination with having your data only recoverable via another Drobo, is a bad combination.
Do you remember Perstor? Strangely enough, I can’t find anything to link to to explain what they were; even Wikipedia doesn’t seem to have an entry for them. I guess they predated the World Wide Web too much. Anyway, back in the pre-IDE-hard-drive days, they manufactured a controller card that would pack twice the data on certain kinds of hard drive than the drive was rated to hold, without any compression.
There were similar complaints about them, but I never had any trouble with them, and I got a lot more out of my very expensive hard drives by using their controller card. Granted, that only meant that I got 80MB out of a 40MB drive (yes, megabytes, not gigabytes, youngsters! 🙂 ), but for that time period, that was a lot. It saved me several hundred dollars, not having to buy a second hard drive.
Yes, but Drobo doesn’t save you any money, if it did, I’d maybe have less objections. 😉 I do admit though, it is an interesting technology, a pity it’s proprietary, and their hardware has a so-so reputation.
Doesn’t save you any money? From the Wikipedia description of it, it would save you a ton of money over RAID-5 (the standard that’s closest to doing what it does), simply by making it possible to use different-sized drives on your array. And despite the flaky reputation that you describe, it can’t be much worse than RAID-5, which no one seems to do properly.
Hmm, OK, maybe it’s not as bad as I think. I still think it’s too expensive though, and not suitable for the enterprise anyway in spite of the price.
(That last comment about price was meant tongue-in-cheek of course. :^) )
To each his own. Apparently enough people disagree with you that the company is still in business. 🙂