Thread: 2 HD's died this month, need BU plan

Originally Posted by ontheellipse

first post!

My setup:
Macbook pro
lacie firewire 800 1 tb hd
airport express
emotiva dac
nad c320bee
vienna acoustics bach grand
(vinyl too, but irrelevant to the thread)
currently playing over airport express but will probably move the mbp to the dac and experiment with some of the playback software i've read about here.

So i've had two external hard drives fail in the last month at work. It's made me nervous about my 1 tb itunes drive at home, as it is currently not backed up.

Basically, i'm looking for the most reliable and cheapest path forward for redundancy. Most of my purchases are analog, so my library is not growing at a rapid rate...probably close to 500gb right now.

I would be satisfied with one level of redundancy; no offsite bu required. What would you do? I've had amazing luck with those metal lacies with firewire 800. Haven't had one die yet. Should i just get another 1 tb drive and schedule a regular drive cloning?

Any thoughts are appreciated.

yes

You need two backups. Best to store one remotely in case your house burns down.

I back up to a second external disk, located on my Airport Extreme. About once a week or so, I take it to work, and sync it with yet another disk. Then I bring it home. I actually use that music library at work, so I have some motivation to do this.

Another thing worth doing is monitoring the SMART status of the disk.

I also agree with the redundancy. I also use the Lace d2 Quadra drives but unfortunately for me I have been struggling with a problem with them. My drives, specifically self ejects at times (the second drive also but less frequently. I have tried switching PSU, USB cables and FW cables.

These two Lacie 2TB replaced two Western Digital 1TB units which I never had this issue with. However, I had a set of variables come into play at about the same time that has made this more difficult to pinpoint. I had the WD units daisy chained together with good FireWire. At about the same time I had a problem and the main board on the Mini was replaced. After that the FW connections would not work. The Apple Store said there was nothing wrong with the ports. At the same time I had needed to get larger drives so I made the move to the Lacie. I also decided to go with some good USB cables because of the perceived problems with the FW ports. The self ejection of the Lacie HDD started after a couple of weeks. It is about 90% on one drive and 10% on the other that this occurs. I swapped cables between the two and power supplies but it didn't seem to matter.

Just two days ago I had to disconnect the system to move some things. For the heck of it I pulled out the stock cables that came with the drives and tried those FW cables. Lo and behold now the FW works. I had gone to ejecting and shutting down the drive used for back up to prevent this 'self ejection'. I have left these on for about 36 hours without incidence. I am going to go through the weekend to see if this will happen again or not. At this moment it is pretty confusing.

Wgscott, have you had any issues with your configuration below?

"I back up to a second external disk, located on my Airport Extreme..."

Originally Posted by findog3103

Wgscott, have you had any issues with your configuration below?

"I back up to a second external disk, located on my Airport Extreme..."

None. But I do this backup manually, after adding stuff to my library. I use rsync (via ForkLift).

What do you have in mind?

Originally Posted by wgscott

None. But I do this backup manually, after adding stuff to my library. I use rsync (via ForkLift).

What do you have in mind?

Thinking of backup for my iTunes/hdtracks folder to a second 1tb or 2 tb external on the extreme and backup weekly using superduper smart update.

I was tired of having disk crashes constantly so I signed up for CrashPlan online cloud storage. I signed up for the unlimited plan which is $200 for two years or about $8.30 a month. I installed on a MacBook and let it rip. Within a a week all of my MacBook was backed up. You can include external drives, so I hooked up my music drive from my Auraliti and now that is 100% backed up on the cloud.

I am in the process of building a Vortex Box server, which is Linux based and can run Crash Plan Linux for real time, continuous cloud backups.