Mac storage: RAID vs Time Capsule???

I use a program called "superduper" to create multiple bootable backups on external hard drives, some of which are always connected and some of which I keep disconnected until I want to perform a backup. You can also use this technique to create a bootable disk for a previous operating system, like SnowLeopard when upgrading to MountainLion. That way, you an always boot from your SnowLeopard environment if necessary.

Joe
 
so much good advice (some of it competing, even conflicting; but, hey, this is the place where we debate everything else ... "does the v2 35 cron really render less beautiful bokeh than the ...."). I appreciate ALL the insights and hope to see more.

my inclination right now (it changes faster than the weather) is to keep the Time Capsule and plan for an upgrade in a year when I see how my needs develop and my patience thins.

If all my hardware died right now, with no possibility of recovery, I do have backups in the form of negatives (they survived a flood already), prints (ditto) and 12,000+ images backed up to flickr. (he writes while knocking wood.)

Before we had all this technology, what, if anything, did most of us do for disaster recovery on negatives and prints? Obviously, film (modern, post-nitrate film) and prints had some special archival qualities that made them durable in ways that digital media might not be. On the other hand, if the building that had all your negatives and prints caught fire, where would you be???

In 1978 the US National Archives AND George Eastman House BOTH had fires in the vaults that housed their archives of nitrate based films (movies). The National Archives lost 12.6 million feet of newsreel footage. My wife worked for a film library (Sherman Grinberg Film Libraries) where the nitrate vault's holding could be seen disintegrating almost before one's naked eyes. The librarians there would cut out rotted sections straight from the reels (cross sections really) as they were cancer (actually, they were cancer). Grinberg had Movietone News, Paramount News, Pathe, etc. newreels, PLUS gillions of feet of 3/4inch video cassettes from ABC News.
 
I have an MBA connecting to an Extreme. The Extreme has two USB drives attached. One is the drive for Time Machine, backing up all other storage devices. The other drive is my work drive for photos, iTunes database and files, and anything else I don't need to store locally on the MBA.

I'd prefer to have a RAID 1 drive as my Time Machine target (I have a friend using this implementation at my suggestion), but I feel fairly comfortable with my current setup until I have made some other investments in photo equipment, supplies and my daughter's year of study in France, and then have the option to upgrade the backup drive.
 
Would not touch a LaCie product AT ALL!

Would not touch a LaCie product AT ALL!

Do the deep research...

Who builds their drives.... no, really who builds them?

Google and Yahoo the words LaCie Issues or Lacie Problems

Sorry, that's just 25 years of computer consulting talking. I would not take on a service contract for network support for any networks incorporating LaCie drives.
 
robklurfield said:
Wow. I'm getting quite an education here. Some of you are clearly more technically proficient than I am. Let's talk budget and an approach that would allow incremental capacity upgrades later. If I could only spend $600 or less and wanted the simplest solution, where would you recommend I spend the money?
Click to expand...

Here's my system:
- MacBook w 500G internal
- working drive for photos - 1T external
- Time Machine backup to external 1T drive (exclude photo directories)
- use Chronosync sw to sync photo directories to external 2T drive archive
- use Chronosync to sync the archive 2T drive to another 2T drive (archive 2)

That's four external drives, two 1T and two 2T, and $30 worth of software, beyond the computer itself. Should be doable (minus the computer, of course) for right around that $600 mark total, maybe a hundred dollars more.
 
From my limited research/reading, I'd rather go with G Tech drives (Seagate if budget dictated) over LaCie.
 
Rob, sorry , just saw your thread, do not have energy to read it all ...

But I will say I have been burned a couple times by time capsule, where I could not restore all data.

The safest solution is to back up using BRUclone to an external RAID. You can elect to make the copy bootable.


Randy
 
Perhaps a different take here. I use time machine on the local computer, but keep images (actually, all non-application data) on external drives. I should use an array to be more secure. But I'm cheap and settle for manual mirroring on a semi-regular basis. The key to me is that it be on an external unit from which data could be extracted by an OS other than mac. You'd be surprised the amount of times failed drive' contents can be salvaged with a linux CD. Choose wisely when you format your discs.
 
Time Capsule has saved my butt so many times It's embarrassing. My raw archive (everything I've ever downloaded from a card or scanned) has been a lifesaver a few times too
 
Avoid the Time Capsule. It is unreliable because of inadequate thermal disspation (plastic rather than metal case) and dog-slow in any case, as it is designed for backups, not as a primary work drive.

Get a Thunderbolt RAID enclosure with a metal chassis acting as a passive heat sink. such as the Hitachi G Drive or Promise Pegasus (Wiebetech and OWC/Newer Tech do not make Thunderbolt arrays yet). I wish WD would make a Thunderbolt version of their excellent metal-bodied My Passport Studio line.
 
I use a Time Capsule 2Tb to back up 3 Macs at home, both wirelessly and wired and apart from the initial backup which takes ages, everything runs smoothly.

Then again, I do not trust ANY harddrive, so I have about 110 Gb of Dropbox space I use to back up all my data! My iPhoto libraries as well as Aperture.

Last but not least, I periodically back up my main mac to a USB drive I store at the office..... you never know. House burns down and Dropbox..... well, what could happen? Anyway, I just do it.

Of course, all the time I backed up everything, no problem whatsoever has occured. Just waiting for the time I stop backing up I guess.
 
use a QNAP Box on our LAN.

you can pack in 4 drives to have a raid, use it for timecapsule, connect an external USB drive to the QNAP for additional automated backup, etc.

superb little unit, fast enough for even big files referenced from Aperture...
 
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