[X4U] how long to clone drive?

[Simon Forster]

On 11 May 2010, at 19:52, alexandre wrote:

> out of the 2, super duper or CCC, which is better, more flexible for back-ups?

Personally, my favourite is rsync. I believe that CCC uses rsync in some instances, so that'd be my choice - but I'm sure they both work extremely well.

Incremental changes don't take too long - unless you're generating large media files. As others have noted, it's a question of how much has changed since the last backup.


On 11 May 2010, at 20:25, zapcat wrote:

> On May 11, 2010, at 11:52 AM, alexandre wrote:
> 
>> as a second back-up, i'd like to clone the 1TB drive (with almost 1 TB of data on it…) in my iMac on a nightly basis. using superduper or carbon copy cloner, how long does it take to complete a clone using a FW800 external drive?
> 
> couple of thoughts. 1 is that, with ever-larger drives available at affordable prices, it's a slippery slope, because people tend to fill them. Just like desks and bookshelves. Problem is that when a 1 TB drive pukes, you have to scramble to come up with that much space among your surviving drives in order to house that refugee data.

External 4 bay enclosure with four 2TB drives each presenting as an individual disk via firewire[1]. At the moment one's about half full with laptop backups (Time Machine) and another is about 3/4 full with media files (movies and music). When I get around to it, I'll backup the media drive once a day using rsync. The Time Machine backups I'm not so worried about. I have plans for the remaining drive.

Simon


[1] RAID. I don't like RAID. In my experience it causes more trouble than its worth. It may work well in a server room but for small office / home office use it's just not robust enough. However, as everyone offers RAID (and no one seems to offer a simple 4 drive JBOD system) I bought a RAID box (2010-03-03). 35 days after installation the local electricity company cut the power. Twice. In short succession (a mislabelled busbar at the local substation). The RAID box reported that the RAID was fine - but the filesystem was hosed. Approx 2TB of data gone. (Engineers in Taiwan remotely accessed the box to confirm this).

You can argue that the RAID should have been on a UPS - and with the benefit of hindsight I'd agree. However, 5 other hard drives associated with a couple of different Macs all went through the same abuse (that discounts the laptop running at the time 'cause that's got a de facto UPS ;-). All five drives popped back up without any reported issue.

Time and time again I've come across situations where RAID has caused the problem. Only use it for data you don't care about.

;-)