SuperDuper (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html) is a great supplement to Time Machine. SuperDuper stores a bootable backup next to your TimeMachine volume. The owner at SuperDuper is very helpful with any Mac backup issues.
Kim
--
Kim Mosley
mrkimmosley@xxxxxxxxx
Website: http://kimmosley.com
Blog: http://kimmosley.com/blog
On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 9:31 AM, Karl Shah-Jenner <shahjen@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
YGelmanPhoto :glad to help!
Thanks, Karl, for this terrific overview. Two questions:
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.
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'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
2. People use a lot of jargon. Is there something like a glossary? Or, better, a Backups for Dummies? In particular, what is RAID?
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
--
Kim Mosley
mrkimmosley@xxxxxxxxx
Website: http://kimmosley.com
Blog: http://kimmosley.com/blog
