Storage plan
urbanaries
Registered Users Posts: 2,690 Major grins
I have a 500GB WD mybook that is going bad. I used it with my Sony laptop and HP desktop for 2 years no prob. But since I've pointed the mac to it, getting some scary errors. Need to get it backed up ASAP.
At the same time, I need a storage solution for the Mac via Time Machine. As I understand, I need to format whatever new HD I use with the Mac from day one or it won't work.
I want to be able to safely access the OLD files from the NEW Mac without issue as well as add files to the vault with the Mac. The old files are all RAWs and JPEGs, so there shouldn't be compatibility issues except for the drive itself. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer but I can't seem to get the point across.
What would your approach be to get the bad HD...which is formatted for PC....copied over to the new....Mac-formatted....HD? I think I need 2TB total (500 to cover old files, 250 for files on the mac, and another 1TB+ for future).
Thanks!
At the same time, I need a storage solution for the Mac via Time Machine. As I understand, I need to format whatever new HD I use with the Mac from day one or it won't work.
I want to be able to safely access the OLD files from the NEW Mac without issue as well as add files to the vault with the Mac. The old files are all RAWs and JPEGs, so there shouldn't be compatibility issues except for the drive itself. I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer but I can't seem to get the point across.
What would your approach be to get the bad HD...which is formatted for PC....copied over to the new....Mac-formatted....HD? I think I need 2TB total (500 to cover old files, 250 for files on the mac, and another 1TB+ for future).
Thanks!
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50mm 1.4, 85mm 1.8, 24-70 2.8L, 35mm 1.4L, 135mm f2L
ST-E2 Transmitter + (3) 580 EXII + radio poppers
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If it is FAT32 formatted, which it PROBABLY is, then it will work if the drive itself is working. Just plug it in and copy the files wherever.
If it is NTFS formatted for some reason, you will need OSX 10.4 or greater, and IIRC it should read it fine (And if you have time machine, you're obviously set here), so, again, just plug it in and copy the files over.
If the drive is working on a PC and not on the Mac for some reason, you'd probably need to use a PC to copy the files to another external drive. Thankfully, this is very easy. If you don't still have the PCs you used to use, just get the old external drive, a new one, find a friend with a few minutes and a PC, plug them in, and copy your stuff over to the new one.
The file systems used by PCs are in use everywhere, can be accessed via Windows, Linux, OSX, and other OSes too. They aren't "PC formatted". FAT32 is ubiquitous, and NTFS is the modern standard for Windows and is also fairly interoperable with other types of computers. There are also ways to access HFS formatted drives in Windows, so you should be able to hook the "time machine" disk up to a PC and grab the contents off of it:
http://www.macwindows.com/disks2.html
So, essentially, you just need a place to put the old files. Getting at them is the easy part, as from either OS you can do it. If the drive is throwing errors on everything, and not working, you'd better have the data somewhere else. A single external drive as the sole storage spot for data isn't a backup, it's the key to disaster. If the data on your backup drive is not on any of your computers, and the drive is toast, you're going to need to look in to data recovery solutions.
I have a separate drive I use solely for Time Machine backups on my Mac.
If you have a spare internal drive lying around (like I sometimes do), this gadget from ThinkGeek works awesomely: http://www.thinkgeek.com/computing/drives/a7ea/
Whichever route you choose, I highly recommend creating a backup file of the drive using your PC and burning the backup to disc. It's a long, slow process if you don't have a previous backup file that just needs updating, but at least you'll have a copy of everything in case something goes wrong with the drive itself.
Forgot to mention - if you're getting "can't write to disk" errors on the external from the Mac, it's because it is NTFS formatted. It doesn't mean anything is wrong with it, you just can't write to it.
It has nothing to do with the drive at all. you can format any external drive to anything you want. I format my external drives to FAT32, so it's guaranteed that it will work no matter who uses the drive. The vast majority of external drives you can buy come pre formatted to FAT32 for this reason.
The reason NTFS can't be written to can be fixed with a driver. Here's a place where you can get it, below. It will work fine, and is in use on millions of computers:
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/
That's it.
There is no need to waste time burning DVDs if you don't have to. Apparently the post I replied to has been deleted.
For a few weeks it read from the Mac just fine. Then last week, not long after I forgot to "eject" the drive properly :cry it started throwing up errors and failing to read/copy files over to the iMac. It was sketchy from the PC (and the plot thickens, as my laptop USB ports are on their way out), but I was able to burn top priority files to a few DVDs. Smugmug has all of my exported JPEGs, so we're mostly talking about RAW files. Sounds dumb, but I am good about duplicity of client RAWs until I've exported them and then keep 3 copies of the JPGs (computer and/or exHD, DVD and smugmug), but my personal (kid) shots are not all processed/exported...they're sprinkled throughout my RAW folders and I am needing to sit down, organize and export them. Bad mommy!
In the future, I really don't need to be accessing files from the PC. If there are situations where I need to edit on the laptop I think a small 250GB portable drive is my solution there.
Regarding redundancy, should I be ponying up for a drobo system or something similar? Is there any alternative to that price tag? Looks like a 4TB hot swappable system is about $1K.
50mm 1.4, 85mm 1.8, 24-70 2.8L, 35mm 1.4L, 135mm f2L
ST-E2 Transmitter + (3) 580 EXII + radio poppers
Thanks for the clarification! I think I understand:
FAT32 - Mac and PC friendly
NTFS - PC only friendly
Is that right?
50mm 1.4, 85mm 1.8, 24-70 2.8L, 35mm 1.4L, 135mm f2L
ST-E2 Transmitter + (3) 580 EXII + radio poppers
Thanks for your experiential wisdom!!! I cringe at the thought of burning all those discs (and then turning around and loading them all) but it's definitely a failsafe method. I wonder if it might be worth the $100 to have Staples back everything up and transfer to the new drive. I just don't have as much free time as I used to (mostly b/c I've always got some IT problem....I thought getting a Mac was supposed to solve all that!
50mm 1.4, 85mm 1.8, 24-70 2.8L, 35mm 1.4L, 135mm f2L
ST-E2 Transmitter + (3) 580 EXII + radio poppers
I believe that OS-X can mount an NFTS file system for read only, as long as it is not password protected. There are also products available that will provide read/write access. FAT32 will provide read/write, but it is not as robust as NTFS and has a 4 GB file size limit. 4 GB is more than enough for most purposes, but beware of backup utilities that try to stuff a whole disk image into a single file, as these will fail on FAT32.
I deleted it because my problem was solved and my post didn't add anything yours hadn't already explained.
Lynne, next time I'll do what you're doing: ask the experts here and find the easier way to do it.
Don't go to staples. Just get another external drive or one of the docks with an internal hooked up to it, and copy all your important stuff over to that drive. Keep that external drive OFF until you do this, you don't want it to fail before you have a spot to back anything up. Start with anything on your malfunctioning external drive, then take care of anything on the mac or PC that you also need backed up. Don't use time machine on this drive or any special software. Just copy the files directly on to the drive. Some cursory organization will of course help, but as long as the files are organized to begin with - IE, when you pull them off of your camera and on to the computer, you put them in a labeled directory, and didn't use a program that uses a metadata only based approach* to backing things up.
*which may leave you with a single folder with every photo you've ever put on your computer (I had Photoshop Elements 3 do this to me, the organizer's backup solution was a file with the information on where to put stuff, and then one directory with thousands and thousands of photos in it sorted only by the moment they were saved at and filenames like B00005025). Screw that and any program that works that way. GRRRR.
So, now, in theory, you have 1 junk external drive that you can trash, 1 new one that you just got and loaded up with stuff, a Mac, and a desire to back your stuff up right.
Now, buy another external drive if you didn't buy two at the outset. Set this one up with time machine if you'd like, and set it up as you please with your Mac. Also have it back up everything that you copied on to external drive 1. As I have not used time machine, can't walk you through the steps to do that in its interface, or whether you even need to use the interface at all (I would just copy the full contents of external drive A to external drive B manually, as it is a one time thing).
There. Now, you have your Mac, an external drive for backup with time machine, and another external drive with everything backed up on it, but could also be used as a data storage disk if you must. If you need more data storage, the solution, of course, is to add more hard disks! Woo! Be happy, though. If you have 2 backup external drives, if one goes down, you just buy a new one, slap it in, and transfer the new data on to it. Piece of cake, the only hassle is the lost money. If you back stuff up on DVDs, each 1TB drive has the data of 200+ DVDs, and any one of them may fail, and you won't notice it as you aren't going to test every one of your 200 backed up DVDs every month/season/year, as it'd be a huge hassle.
Due to this, the 2
FAT32 isn't as robust as NTFS for a variety of reasons, the largest of which are the reasons why NTFS can be a pain to write to when not using Windows - NTFS was designed as a file system that supports secure access, whereas there's nothing resembling security built in to FAT32 - this is irrelevant if you're not controlling user access to data as you would on a corporate network or something of that sort, so don't think I'm talking about something that would affect you. It was put in for businesses. I don't know why people use backup programs that work by creating images of the disk, but, hey, whatever floats their boat (My guess is for reasons of compression). In my book, better to just store the files as they were on the computer so you can get at them with anything, and no additional software.
FAT32 is everything friendly. Everything supports it out of the box, and will be happy with it.
Here's some more reading on FAT:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table
And some more on NTFS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTFS
NTFS can be made "friendly" with OSX through this driver, as I posted before:
http://www.ntfs-3g.org/
If you install that - note the OSX version, everything should work fine. It might not work with time machine, I don't know, I don't use Macs on a regular basis, there could be some weird conflict of some sort. A quick googling reveals it's possible to do, though. It does seem that time machine, by deafult, will only back stuff up to an HFS drive. This can be accessed by a Windows machine, but will be a pain to get to (you'll need to find software to do it with). If you'll only ever use the drive to back up a mac, and only use it with time machine, just formatting the whole thing as HFS is fine.
Time machine will be able to deal with multiple partitions - if a disk has a FAT32 partition and an HFS one, it probably won't even show you the FAT32 one. I don't know how it'll work to set it up on the Mac, or what you will see, but if you have a backup drive that you need to use with a Mac and PC, and for some reason want to use Time Machine on the Mac, you could format the drive to more than one partition, say, half as HFS for the Mac, and half as FAT32, which would give you access to that half of the hard disk on any computer hanging around. But if I were in that situation, I wouldn't use Time Machine, and just use some other method of backing stuff up from the mac, be it manual or a different piece of software, and use FAT32 only on the drive.
Samba is another alternative but is overkill if you're just transferring files back and forth. If you have a bunch of computers running on different platforms, though, it is worth looking in to (I suspect none of you have a real use for Samba, but I'm throwing it out there in case you want to find something more powerful)
Yeah, it's a failsafe, but so is an additional external hard drive, and the latter can be backed up to automatically, or with a few clicks if you're doing it manually. In my opinion, with the price of what hard disks are these days, there's no reason to back stuff up to DVDs. $100 buys you a terabyte hard disk - the external SATA dock recommended by Llywellyn is a fantastic idea. Just plug in a new drive, fill it up, and you're set. Another alternative is a blu-ray writer. They start around $230. I don't know if they're supported in OSX yet, but that gets you 50GB per disc as opposed to 5, and would make backing up photos to optical discs a lot less of a chore. My recommendation is still for hard disks, though.
Here's an external 1TB hard disk for $100 after a rebate, no need for a dock:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822204069
Here's a dock, with 2 hard disks already in it, which can be replaced/upgraded whenever - it's just like the one from thinkgeek but does 2 drives at once and has 2TB of storage ready to go
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101130:
And, if you get a bare dock, here's a bare internal drive, amongst many. These are quieter than most but with adequate performance:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136151
I've experienced losing data before, and it sucks, frankly. I wouldn't wish it upon anyone. The 4000+ photos I lost (all the RAWs, I have remaining jpegs of some of them) caused me to move to a setup that gives me multiple backups and the ability to take my external drive if there is a fire or something - I use 3-4 drives in my PC at any given time, have automatic backups set for photos, music, and a few other things to go on a weekly or bi-weekly basis (I forget) to a 500GB external drive, and I keep a few older hard disks in my main PC which I manually back up my photos to in addition to the external. You should keep data in 3 places at once if you want to consider it secure, and preferably one of these locations should be off site - I've yet to do that but have plans for some online storage for the most important items.
If not for my old flickr account, I wouldn't have this shot at all. At least I have a ~2MP jpeg of it. It was one of many.
The other reason I use internal drives for active backups is that I know they are working - this is one of the reasons I don't use optical discs to back my stuff up: every day, I use all the drives on my computer, except the external. I don't need to check and make sure that the drives are functional, because if they stopped working, I'd know it. If you back up to optical discs and assume they are safe - then you go to access them in a time of need and some of the discs no longer work, what do you do then? Sure, they might last ten years or more... but they might not. They might go bad in 2 years or less, even if you properly store them.
That was my mistake. I had stuff backed up on to an older external drive I had used in my computer for a long time (It was an internal drive in an external enclosure). My main hard disk died, so I figured I'd just pull the backup up once I got things running again...
It didn't work.
In more recent times, when I've shot something important, I've purchased a flash card for the event, put it on my computer, but never used the flash card for anything else, with intent to keep the images on it for a year or two. Hey, they're cheap, and nonvolatile. Of course, I probably have 40-50GB of flash memory now, which would cost all of $100 to replace.
On a Mac "fixing" things:
Getting a Mac isn't going to solve things, it's just another tool. They've got issues too. Not as many, perhaps, and it's easier to break Windows (Particularly XP, particularly with viruses and spyware), but it's not a panacea. I see Windows machines overrun with crap on a regular basis, and, frankly, I don't even understand how people manage to do it. All my stuff works great, and has for the last 15 years I've been running the damn OS )I'm not saying I've never had issues, I've had my fair share, but everything has been fixable, and the last 5+ years have been really trouble free, software wise). On a Canon, you twiddle X button to change Y feature, on a Nikon, you twiddle Z button instead. Mac/PC is the same. Different user interface paradigms, but there are ways to get to everything.
I toy around with linux a little bit, but don't know it very well - so I run in to problems on a regular basis with it. I ask an experienced Linux user "why is this? How do I fix it?", and the Linux user says "Oh, it's supposed to work that way, you're supposed to need to configure xxx file in xxx location with xxx information for yyy reason". While OSX is based on Unix, here's a (not so) little tidbit about why they're different to use, regarding dealing with hardware and software:
OSX is very tightly controlled, Apple likes to maximize its control over the user interface and experience. They also have to support a minimum amount of hardware, as every *supported* computer running OSX runs on Apple hardware, designed by Apple. Apple chooses all of the motherboards, RAM, hard disks, controllers, displays, and every single thing that comes on their computers. This is their biggest advantage, and they use it fully. Their hardware is very good (Though, I might add, they use most of the same chips that are in everyone's PCs too), and their software is tightly integrated with their platform. The down side is that, because Apple acts like a monopoly of itself(IE, they are a hardware company), you can't build your own Mac with whatever components you desire. This makes it easier to have a trouble free system in that regard, as there aren't tens of thousands of random motherboards they need to support. The downside is that if you want a Mac, you have to pay the Apple Tax to get it... namely that the same hardware costs a lot more if you're getting an Apple (30-100%).
Windows is more loosely controlled. It's still not open source, but you can run it on any hardware you want, develop drivers for any hardware you want (Not that you can't do your own with OSX either, but there's a much smaller market for this stuff with Macs - you'll find that for example they have great printer support as many people use printers, but there are many other pieces of hardware where most of it won't work on the Mac) - the result of this is that you have thousands of products to sort through, many of which have minor niggles and issues due to the designer messing something up, or something that's out of spec that works with most things doesn't work with something that is not flawed. Currently, there are 2100 different motherboards on sale at newegg.com, 1700 different sticks of RAM, 1700 different video cards, 850 different network cards... all at one store. Now, many of them are just different cards and boards that use the same chips on them, but even they can have their issues. Microsoft doesn't sell this hardware, other companies do, so you're stuck picking out what is good and what isn't, and there are chances of incompatabilites. Likewise, the market for software is huge in comparison, as is the user base, so there are oftentimes a lot of confusing software options, and the biggest security issue that Windows has when compared with anything else is that almost everyone uses it. A lot of the problems people encounter are hardware related, and everything is going to have hardware problems. Hardware issues as a percentage are pretty similar between most computer manufacturers, just as they are pretty similar between similar kinds of cameras but different manufacturers.
Linux has an even larger hardware base than Windows Vista does (Not as large as XP, though), and it needs to support it with even less corporate backing. For many companies, the people that write the drivers for various pieces of hardware, not to mention the operating system itself, are doing it... as a hobby! But Linux as a whole is far more fragmented than Windows. It's designed in a far more modular manner, and if the different modules don't work together, you do not have a working computer. I break Linux with ease, totally unintentionally, because I don't know what I am doing or how it works.
So, in Linux, for example, you have multiple different desktop environments. The base OS is the same, but some programs are intended to work in one desktop environment, and not in another. Or, to run some common pieces of software, you don't just install them, you download the actual program, and compile it before you can use it, and if you don't have certain libraries, you can't compile it. This is stuff that is totally foreign to the average PC/Mac user, but it's how it was designed. It's much improved over what it was a decade ago, but there's still a big gap in end user usability from our perspective.
TLDR version:
Apple = Centralized hardware/OS
Windows = Centralized OS/decentralized hardware
Linux = decentralized everything
Okay, that was way off topic. Sometimes I like to babble