[MacDV] Looking for more storage?

[Peter van der Linden]

On Jan 8, 2004, at 8:15 AM, Doug Mitchell wrote:

>  my "users folder" ... was about 6 gig so backing up to rewritable 
> CD's is not a good option.  I recently purchased a 120 gig external 
> firewire drive for my digital video files but I don't want to use this 
> space to back up my main hard drive.  I could purchase a rewritable 
> DVD drive or I could purchase another harddrive.

Backups need to be quick and convenient, or else they don't get done.  
Then when your disk fails (which statistically is the most likely 
failure on a system, as well as the most catastrophic) you are hosed.

The current generation of consumer DVD's only go up to 4.7GB capacity.  
The next generation will go to 9GB, but they won't be available in 
volume for a year or more.  So you need to back up to disk.  The 
alternative is to find some software that can split backups across 
several dvds.  Or to split your data so that no one folder is bigger 
than a single dvd.  That's tiresome - we have computers to keep track 
of that kind of stuff. I recommend you get a cheap external firewire 
disk.  Any capacity in excess of 6GB will do.  A used disk is fine.  
Better, get a couple of used external disks, and rotate them.

But because of the small disks that Apple fits as standard (40-80GB on 
your Quicksilver G4 - and it has 2 firewire ports, so you don't need to 
buy any cards) you might as well get a slightly bigger disk and backup 
the entire internal disk.  And make the backup bootable.  After all, 
when your HDD fails, it will take the OS with it.  If you have your 
data only backed up, you have no way of using it.     If you have 
backed up a bootable image, you can still run quite happily while you 
buy and install a replacement internal disk.   This is the approach I 
use for backups.

I highly recommend Mike Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner shareware for 
creating bootable backups.
    http://www.bombich.com/software/index.html
Don't forget to defragment the disk, to place your razor blades under a 
pure crystal pyramid, and to wear a magic mood ring, if you belong to 
cult of ridiculous platter believers.  ;-)

      Peter