Computer Backup Plan: A Foolproof & Affordable System
August 25, 2010 by Rick Smith
Filed under All Posts, Video Production
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Here’s another backup solution that we’ve used successfully for the last 2 years:
We’re Mac-based and use Time Machine – the backup software in Mac OSX – to create hourly incremental backups to a Drobo with 4 drive bays. The Drobo technology allows you to add and upgrade drives as needed. We started with 2 500GB drives and now have 2-1.5TB and 2-2TB drives installed. As we replace drives with larger ones, the old drives get used as final archive volumes for completed projects and are stored offsite.
This system has some great benefits:
1) With Time Machine, the backup file stores daily and weekly backups. Currently, we can go back to any week for the last year and recover files at that stage of development. This is about as redundant as it gets and more useful for us than having a Super Duper snapshot of the current state only. Sometimes a wrongly deleted file or folder doesn’t get discovered for a few days.
2) Internal hard drives are about as cheap and efficient a storage solution as there is. We use them in an e-sata docking station to do the final archive so we save space and cost by not having enclosures and cables to deal with.
3) The Drobo approach to RAID storage seems more reliable that traditional RAID arrays. We’ve had issues recovering data from mirrored RAID drives but have yet to have an issue with the Drobo. Knock on wood.
Most of our work is digital stills, but more and more projects include video slide shows, so from an archive standpoint, the issues are the same.
Thanks for your in-depth comment on your backup solution, Paul.
One thing, does Time Machine give you a written list of your projects or do you compile something like that separately so you know which older drive those files may be on?
Thanks for that very helpful comment, Paul. Backing up is something we all should do, but how to do it effectively eludes many people, and that can be at a very high price.
Great article we have done really well using a full service backup provider that we consider the best backup for many reasons. DiskAgent provides you the ability to optionally backup content to any device as well as their data centers (at an extra fee of course) As such the DiskAgent data protection solution offers the best backup options available in the market. They also provide remote wipe and remote backup in a bundled package so that if your computer or even a smartphone is lost or stolen you can locate the device and or remotely wipe the data from the drives.