YGelmanPhoto :
Thanks, Karl, for this terrific overview. Two questions:
glad to help!
1. You mention Synchback from 2brightsparks as a good backup system. I
looked at the site and was impressed, but I couldn't find any mention of a
Mac capability. Could you recommend a good backup provider for Macs?
I'm afraid I fall flat on my face when it comes to Apple products,
hopefully someone here who knows that OS will be able to advise or offer
suggestions.
2. People use a lot of jargon. Is there something like a glossary? Or,
better, a Backups for Dummies? In particular, what is RAID?
I'll defer to wiki here, they have a few excellent articles that do a better
job of me fumbling about trying to cobble together an explanation
RAID:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
RAID 1 is a goodie for us photographers
"A RAID system used as a main system disk is not intended as a replacement
for backing up data. In parity configurations it will provide a backup-like
feature to protect from catastrophic data loss caused by physical damage or
errors on a single drive. Many other features of backup systems cannot be
provided by RAID arrays alone. The most notable is the ability to restore an
earlier version of data, which is needed to protect against software errors
causing unwanted data to be written to the disk, and to recover from user
error or malicious deletion. RAID can also be overwhelmed by catastrophic
failure ..RAID is also vulnerable to controller failure since it is not
always possible to migrate a RAID to a new controller without data loss.
RAID drives can serve as excellent backup drives when employed as removable
backup devices to main storage, and particularly when located offsite from
the main systems. However, the use of RAID as the only storage solution does
not replace backups."
Hard Drive interfaces (for those swapping drives):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_interfaces
I didn't mention SCSI hard drives though I and others still use them for
their speed and reliability because they're horrendously expensive and can
be a nightmare to set up! They can go up to 15,000 RPM and have some pretty
slick seek times.. but the also tend to have a very noticable and
recognisable whine which becomes annoying unless they're sound deadened..
(nor did I mention Hitachi and Toshiba drives as I think they're .. er,
enreliable)
Backing up: (a good reference and probably the glossary you're after ;)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_backup
more on IDE/PATA drives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA
and SATA:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SATA
and SCSI:
External drives in general:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/External_hard_disk_drive
a couple o footnotes:
USB3 hard drives (well, cases) are already shipping for tose who feel the
need for speed !
"A common misconception is that a colder hard drive will last longer than a
hotter hard drive. The Google study seems to imply the reverse-"lower
temperatures are associated with higher failure rates". Hard drives with
S.M.A.R.T.-reported average temperatures below 27 °C (80.6 °F) had higher
failure rates than hard drives with the highest reported average temperature
of 50 °C (122 °F), failure rates at least twice as high as the optimum
S.M.A.R.T.-reported temperature range of 36 °C (96.8 °F) to 47 °C (116.6
°F)."
"The mean time between failures (MTBF) of SATA drives is usually about
600,000 hours (some drives such as Western Digital Raptor have rated 1.4
million hours MTBF), while SCSI drives are rated for upwards of 1.5 million
hours"
karl
