I still manually back-up my digital work. We’ll see how long that lasts. There are plenty of noteworthy programs out there that I hear do a great job of doing this automatically.
So let’s take a look. The goal is to have two versions of everything that is still being worked on. One version is on an internal drive and the other is somewhere else (like an external HD or a different computer). Once projects are finished, or finished for the time being, they are back up to DVD.
Each DVD is marked by a number and has a brief description which is filed away into a warm case.
On my computer, there is one master document that lists the back-up DVDs by number and everything that is on them. The trick here is listing every filename and folder name that is on the DVD, printing the file structure. Then the back-ups can be searched like things are searched for when they are still on the computer.
Printing the file structure for a DVD or any other folder is simple. Using the Terminal program in Mac OS X, navigate to the base folder that you are interested in and type: ls -GR1
G: colorizes output, R: Recursively lists subdirectories, 1: Forces every entry to be one line.
The system reinforces good file naming and folder hierarchy from start to finish. Anybody else have a back-up strategy they’d like to share? Anybody that uses Time Machine want to chime in?
2 Comments
Jeff
December 27th 2008 @ 04:52 PM #
Call me crazy, but I just have a Norco hard drive array with 12x 1.5 TB hard drives in it, RAID-5 configured, yielding 16.5 terabytes of redundant storage. I also keep a hot-swap, spare 1.5 TB drive (~$130 these days, Samsung) ready in case one of them fails. I can’t handle multiple simultaneous hard drive failures, however, just one
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On the realistic side, I’ve tried Mozy.com – mixed reviews, was way too slow – and also use an external 500GB hard drive with Time Machine on my primary MacBook Pro… but Time Machine annoys me for some reason.
dan
December 31st 2008 @ 02:02 PM #
The term Tera still sort of ruffles my feathers but I think that just means that I need to start using it. Using a bigger drive I would then probably start using RAID—good call.