Here's another reason why NOT TO USE EXTERNAL DRIVES Exclusively and have your music backed up.....

My friend's WD Passport died on him. He had all his music neatly organized there. About 70GB worth. Most were vinyl rips from his hard to find FUNK selection & old school hip hop. He's a huge collector.

Anyhow, none of my macs or his mac would recognize his drive. Eventually, I was able to recover all the data and copied it to my MacPro. Imagine if he would've lost it? The only thing he lost was his crates.

The same thing happened to my old WD Passport soI don't trust those drives anymore.

His external HD is no longer working, and his laptop had an 80GB drive. I just replaced his laptop's drive with a 320 Seagate HD. To my surprise, the original drive was a FUJITSU! WTF? lol And as I'm typing this right now, I'm installing Snow Leopard on it.

I've had really good luck with Western Digital's drive mechanisms, but their enclosures are a whole other story. Besides having bad quality/heat-dissipation/reliability, WD often uses lower-spec drive mechanisms to put into those external enclosures (smaller cache being a common example).

Why is it that so many people have to learn about the necessity of backups the hard way?

I have a 2tb drive and i back it up every week! i here about people with no back up and its just crazy! One show will pay for a backup its foolish not to have one! I started with a 500 gb hd then 1tb then 1.5tb now 2tb and i hade a backup for each one!

2.5tb backup at home & 1tb portable for club
only have commerial must plays on my laptop (30gigs worth of music)

I use XCopy on my Mac and Clone my Passport Studio to 2 Phantom Drives simultaneously every week. I carry one in a gun case, in case I need it, and keep the other at home. So technically I carry one WD Studio Passport and one Phantom Drive in a case for back up at the gig.

yell i'm so parnoid that i have back ups on my dual layered dvd's so if my harddrives fail i still have the dvd back ups. I know that it's over kill but i would rather have tons of dvd's to reload, then to have 2-3tb hard drives fail.

External hard drives usually houses a good quality hard drives with long MTBF (mean time before failure [in hours]) but some of the manufacturers just don't know how to design a proper casing for an external hard drive. Usually heat is the #1 problem (more heat = less hard drive lifetime). Secondly the cheap external power adapters they're using (especially LaCie).

So most of the time the hard drives aren't completely "died" and the data can be fully recovered. Just thinking about doing a small tutorial or something about these things, what do you all think?

I use external drives exclusively. I have zero music/movies on my computer. If the computer dies, I'm ready to move on to the next. If the external drive dies, I have two identical ones just like it.

You just gotta be safe!!!!! (no condom)

same here.

my lacie rugged just shit the bed a couple weeks ago. sent you a pm tekniq.

Me too, I run 1 of these for my gigs www.lacie.com and keep another in the bag for backup.

At home, my main music library lives on one of these www.g-technology.com and mirror this with another 2 TB Drive....

Although I will need to upgrade to a larger main library drive soon, probably 4TB.
Any Tips?


That would be very nice...

I'm glad I'm an IT professional.

I get all my IT needs for free. I have sata drives, external drive casings, dual layer dvds, IP phones, hell even the TWO laptops that I use for home and serato, both are from work. I have about 3 backups of my music at home and at work....diaster recovery!!!

drooling...

my ipod classic is my backup right now. havent got a external yet, but will soon.

mine is backed up on 2 computers and one drive.

too many drives and this and that. whats wrong with burning all my files to CD and storing those somewhere safe? i still have CD's from when i was 15 and they are still good to play.

that's the way, right der
pro tip: keep your VSL S/N in your phone

Save yourself some backup time if youre on a mac and use Time Machine.

All my music is stored internally on my laptops HD, which is backed up to an external drive via Time Machine, so i literally just have to have it plugged in and it automagically backs everything up.

I then also have all my music & crates synced to an external travel size drive via a couple automated backup files using Synchronize! X which i take with me to gigs in case my laptop dies.

I can backup and sync everything to both drives with 2-3 clicks.

Time machine is cool but it's always good to have that bootable backup too. I have a stupid amount of music on my internal (lazy) which is backed up via time machine on a seagate. I also run a competely bootable backup of my whole system via synchronise pro plus on a WD 1 TB. I still worry though.. Need another backup lol.

Anybody run a solid state drive? Are they more reliable? Will they stand the test of time and usage any better? Any feedback appreciated.

can you use Time Machine from one external to another?

I am new to Macs and have been scared to lose ish.

i like to live on the edge f*** a backup!


































nah i got raid 1 2tb external enclosure [www.thermaltakeusa.com]. Hardware Raid

I just upgraded my Macbook Unibody 13" internal drive to the Hitachi Travelstar 7200rpm 500gb (already need more room). I created a bootable backup on my G-Drive external drive using Carbon Copy Cloner.

CCC is the *ish, plus it's free...or donation ware.

Carbon Copy Cloner? Thanks 4 the tip!

SuperDuper is similar to Carbon Copy Cloner, and if you pay the $28 "shareware fee" it unlocks smart-backup functionality...that makes it much more useful (time-saving) for ongoing regular backups.

Like Carbon Copy Cloner (and unlike Time Machine), SuperDuper creates bootable backups.

I used to work in the back up and recovery industry and one thing that people tend to forget is an "off-site back" if your house burns down, your backup burns two.

sixxx,

So nothing your computer, strictly external? I was thinking of doing this. Any problems with loading of songs? Slow loads? or problems with serato?

get a room you 2...no problem for me using Firewire 400 bus powered drive (LaCie 250GB) for audio drive and Firewire 800 bus powered (WD 500GB) for video drive. MacBook Pro 2.5Ghz I back up to a partitioned 1TB (WD) via e-sata using SuperDuper. Been that way for about a year/over 50 gigs. Love it. Only content on my internal is for emergencies only.

I have two back ups at home, 1 that I always use, 1 extra on my bag, and finally 1 on the trunk of my car, along with an extra mixer in my [which is not very expensive] oh and an extra headphone [for some reason I sometimes forget mine at home]

This is one of the reasons I always keep an updated back up in my car.

I have (2) cars, so this would not work as a soultion for me. I always take 2 of them in my bag.

I Use a HP dv9000 Pc and i just recently find out the this pc have a second HD option so i put a Seagate Momentus 500gb, 16 MG cache, 7200 RPM and its been working like a champ. I still carry with me a Back up External just in case.

Good stuff. My alienware has a cool feature. It has a second hard drive slot that you can switch 2.5 hard drives with if u buy the plastic housing. Its not hot swap but very nifty if you have a hard drive failure and want to switch to backup. Il post up a video explaining in more detail.

+1

at least get a fireproof safe for a copy

Same here.

+1



No one tried it. But my theory is that they are better than standard hard drive since they have no moving parts inside them. Most hard drive dies because the read/write head simply fails. I am not too anal about hard drive failure tho, because most DJ's hard drive fail because of it being not cared properly. Most people just throw it in a bag and it bounces around in the back, and I care a lot for my externals.