External HDD Failure

I am not an expert in these subjects but feel too much of backup process could be the reason for HDD failures! Occasional / moderate backup is more safer than frequent ones right?

I do backup manually in copy/paste manner to “keep in mind where is what” and not sure if I am lagging a century behind workflow trends!

wickedpixel said
The Matrix has us.

exactly

+1 for RAID , it will save your live!

VF said
I do backup manually in copy/paste manner to “keep in mind where is what” and not sure if I am lagging a century behind workflow trends!

Ok, I have this question than. Let’s assume I have 500 GB worth of images. Those I definitely want to keep, but not to occupy space on my machine. So those will be moved to an external HDD or DVDs (anybody still using DVD ’s around?!).

Or you keep everything on your machine, and then make backups on top of that?

I guess storage dependency is as bad as oil dependency. I’d love to have 100000 TB available and never thing about file size again.

bobocel said
Thanks, I will look into RAID . This HDD that failed, has two hdd of 1 TB each, so I think it will be good to go with for RAID .

The HDD is seen by disk utility, only a partition isn’t recognized, but repair does not work.

At the moment I’m using disk warrior to try and recover the data. I’ll see how that goes.

I use a RAID5 system backed up intermittently to another RAID5 system. Still no guarantee that it won’t all go wrong. RAID can be a bit wobbly sometimes too (worth getting a good controller), but when it works, it’s great. When jobs are finished, I archive them to single hard-drives and then leave them on the shelf.

Stuff I desperately want to keep is backed up in duplicate or triplicate, usually in two locations and the finished results (for the reel) lightly compressed on the web.

If and when it all goes wrong, Disk Warrior is a good bet.

Yeah, hope it will work. Right now is doing this for about 20 hours – http://o7.no/IVw2bp

bobocel said
Ok, I have this question than. Let’s assume I have 500 GB worth of images. Those I definitely want to keep, but not to occupy space on my machine. So those will be moved to an external HDD or DVDs (anybody still using DVD ’s around?!).

Or you keep everything on your machine, and then make backups on top of that?

I guess storage dependency is as bad as oil dependency. I’d love to have 100000 TB available and never thing about file size again.

Then also get a NAS with a RAID setup

I have my main rig which has 1TB in RAID so its a complete clone where I keep all my work etc then photos and music etc is kept on my NAS which is 4TB RAID which can be accessed anywhere on the network or over the internet, there’s even have an iPhone app (google synology diskstations). I then do a backup from my rig to my NAS of my working dir once a week, just to be sure

bobocel said
Yeah, hope it will work. Right now is doing this for about 20 hours – http://o7.no/IVw2bp

fingers crossed you get it all back

After two of my external HDD ’s failded I can honestly say I would never trust external HDD ’s as a backup solution (especially WD)

Now I use Crashplan+ as my backup solution which gives me unlimited backup space for all of my computers. It silently backs up all of the folders I choose, meaning I don’t really need to manage my backups manually. It backs up unlimited revisions of each of my files, so in case I messed up a something I can always go back in time for an earlier version.

Also, my files are always available on the cloud anywhere I go which is another huge plus for me when my computer is not turned on.

The initial backup may take up some time but it worths it.