External hard drive advice wanted-MAC

[ecogeorge]

Following a loss of all email folders tonight on my MAC with only partial recovery , it has highlighted the need to have a backup.
I intend to utilise MAC's  "Time Machine" function but need an external hard drive.
Can anyone recommend one ? needs to be straight forward to use/connect etc . I may be an anorak but I am not a nerd when it comes to computers.
rgds George.

[knighty]

how quickly do you need it, and how much space do you need ?

prices have doubled in the last month after the floods in Thailand... if you wait a couple of months the prices will come down a lot :-)
(actually... I just checked and they've more than doubled!)


or... if you don't need to store so much... you can use a (free) online solution like http://www.dropbox.com/ ... I think you get 2gb for free... then need to pay if you want more... I haven't used it myself (no need for it) but I know a lot of people who do use it and are very happy with it :-)


it's pretty simple to use... you install the software and up pops an extra folder on your computer, then you can copy files to/from this folder just like any other folder... but it's all stored on a remote server.... (where it's backed up and nice and safe)... also handy if you have more than 1 computer, or move around a lot... you can install the same account on each machine/location, so whatever you copy to it from one computer is there for all the other computers to see/access :-)

[ecogeorge]

Normal space required, -1000 photos, 400 music tracks plus email and document files -all personal , not work.
No films/ dvds.
Not keen on storing personal data (passwords etc) remotely ,-I seem to have enough lost relations in Africa as it is
Just annoying to lose data no matter how trivial.
rgds George.

[Brian-s]

How big is the hard disk on your Mac? Time machine will take a full backup of your internal hard disk and incremental backups hourly. You need a disk bigger than your internal disk. The bigger the disk you get the the further back in the past you will be able to retrieve files.

[knighty]

Normal space required, -1000 photos, 400 music tracks plus email and document files -all personal , not work.
No films/ dvds.
Not keen on storing personal data (passwords etc) remotely ,-I seem to have enough lost relations in Africa as it is

I wouldn't worry about privacy with something like dropbox... it's fully secure and encrypted...  your data will be safer on there than on your mac...

if you want something now.. get yourself an external usb drive, don't buy a cheap one, make sure it has a metal case (for cooling)... other than that they're all pretty much the same

if you wanted to store a load of dvd's etc. on it and would be using it a lot then you really need one with a fan in it.... but for the odd photo/mp3/email you don't have to worry so much :-)

[dhaslam]

If you can afford it a NAS system with mirrored drives is better and just use the internal drive for backup.    I  have a Synology  four 2.5" drive system but with just two drives at present.  The smaller drives use less power but are more expensive initially.  My computer also has  mirrored drives, something you don't get when buying off the shelf.     

[Rhea View]

I use a mac professionally in publishing and privately at home.

I use the I-Omega external hard drive for back-up. It's huge (physically, quite small and sleek!) and easy to use - just plug in via usb. If you use Carbon Copy Cloner (free online and about as easy as it gets to use), you can clone your entire hard drive if necessary.

Dropbox! It's fantastic. Wouldn't be without it. Private and makes transferring files between iPad and Mac seemless.

[billi]

 wow   my 64 GB SD card   works fine everywhere  , Apple still is so conservative to ignore ?

[knighty]

wow   my 64 GB SD card   works fine everywhere  , Apple still is so conservative to ignore ?

SD cards aren't very reliable for this kind of use mind

[Contadino]

Time Machine is really good. Mine backs up onto a Western Digital Passport drive.

[SimonHobson]

It really doesn't make much difference what make you use - all are reasonably OK performance wise these days (especially for backups). External drive prices really haven't followed the hikes in bare drive prices - at work we've recently bought some external drives and removed the cases to get drives for a customer project !

The main choice is to capacity (bigger is better !), and interface. It would help to know the model of Mac and what ports it has. Until relatively recently, all Macs had Firewire (some of them Firewire 800) and contrary to what people say, Firewire at 400Mbps is actually faster than USB2 at 480Mbps due to architectural differences. Firewire 800 even more so. Also, Firewire can supply more power (12W) than USB (2.5W) and you get a better choice of drives powered from the computer. eSATA is much faster still if your computer has it.
Older Macs only have USB1.1 which at 12Mbps is really slow - so if you have one of these then definitely go for Firewire.

Aim for your backup to be at least twice the size of your main disk (or at least twice the size of your data) and you'll get a lot of backups going back some time on it (but obviously not going back before you started, Time Machine isn't that good )

Most drives will come either unformatted, or worse, formatted with a PC filesystem (either FAT32 or possibly NTFS for really big drives). Use Disk Utility to change this and use HFS (Journaled) which is the Macs native filesystem

Lastly, remember that although Time Machine is infinitely better than the backups most people don't have a all, it's still an "all eggs in one basket" situation. If someone breaks in and nicks your Mac, or the house burns down, then your backup is likely to go with it.
The easiest way to deal with that is to use an online backup system as suggested, or buy two drives.
With two drives, leave one at a trusted friends house and swap them round every so often. You'll have to go into Time Machine and tell it to switch drives each time, but you'll have a copy of your stuff off-site if the worst happens.
it is of course possible for the backup drive to fail or for the data on it to get corrupted. Such a second drive would give you some protection from that as well.
The biggest downside is that you won't have all your backups available - ie there'll be gaps in what Time Machine can show you.


Of course, you could go OTT like me. As well as using Time Machine, I have an old Mac in the back room (along with my other servers) which runs Retrospect and backs up all the computers in the house. For that, I have four hard drives (used to use tapes) and at any time have two at work and two at home which get rotated. So generally I have 3 or 4 copies of all my data, 2 of which are in the office. But then I've been responsible for backups for several employers over the years, so I'm somewhat more attuned to the requirements and risks than the average home user.

[ecogeorge]

Thanks for such a comprehensive reply. 

Have firewire 400 apparently  and 1G memory. Will look for 2G external drive and firewire cable.
Thanks again.
George.

[MarkB]

I'm not on a Mac so this is slightly off topic, but running Linux on a small server which stores all our data.

For this machine I have a two stage backup system.

Firstly, I have a second internal drive that contains regular backups (essentially hourly during the day) using rsnapshot (a wrapper around rsync). This provides a local, rapid and automatic way to retrieve corrupted or accidentally deleted files almost instantly. Backups are kept hourly for a day, daily for a week, weekly for a month, monthly for 6 months. It does it all through links so the file system overhead is quite small (~1% or less) unless there are big file deletions or changes on a regular basis. I don't have to remember to plug any disk in and run a backup, it just does it in the background.

While this protects me against file corruption or accidental damage it does nothing for catastrophic issues, such as the house burning down or the machine being stolen. For this I use a third hard drive that I keep at work and periodically (roughly every 2 weeks) take home to sync with the internal backup drive using rsync. I connect this using a eSATA hard drive dock, so I just have to carry the disk (in a protective box) back and forward. eSATA is much quicker than USB2 - I can see transfer rates easily in excess of 30MByte/s for large files. My system can also recognise 3TB files through eSATA while many USB drive caddies/docks still don't handle more than 2TB properly.

I don't know, but I suspect that eSATA is also faster than FireWire. If it is an option then definitely look at it.

While this not directly MAC related, the backup philosophy may be useful, and it's likely that Time Machine is just an Apple wrapper around rsync and/or rsnapshot (or possibly a re-implementation).

[SimonHobson]

I don't know, but I suspect that eSATA is also faster than FireWire.

It is considerably faster. eSATA is 1.5 or 3Gbps depending on the drive and controller specs, and there's also a 6Gbps standard in use now. Electrically eSATA is just the same as SATA (and SAS), it just has a different and more robust connector.
Firewire (aka iLink, aka IEE something or other) was originally 400Mbps, and 800Mbps is common - and I vaguely recall talk of there being a 1.6Gbps version but don't recall ever having seen it on anything.
USB2 does 480Mbps, but is architecturally inferior to Firewire. USB3 does something like 1.5Gbps IIRC, but needs all new cables and controllers for that - the connectors are designed to be backwards compatible so USB3 devices will connect with USB2 devices and work at USB2 speeds.

While this not directly MAC related, the backup philosophy may be useful, and it's likely that Time Machine is just an Apple wrapper around rsync and/or rsnapshot (or possibly a re-implementation).

Time Machine is very similar. It creates snapshots done with hard links just like you can do with rsync (and I assume is what you are doing with rsnapshot). As you say, this file-level deduplication is generally fairly efficient on disk usage - unless you are editing lots of large media files which can quickly use up space.

The big advantage of Time Machine over other options is the simplicity. It's not very configurable, lacks features many of us more advanced users would like, but it's trivial for even basic users to set up and use. Just plug in a disk, designate it as a Time Machine backup, and let it get on with it. If you want to retrieve a file, just "Enter Time Machine", the background changes to the "warp drive" space background, and you can shuffle back and forth through time and the files as they were at any particular time are displayed as normal in the finder window.
As I said earlier, it's not a substitute for what we would probably call a "proper" backup with multiple generations stored off-side, but it's not intended to be. It's intended to be something simple enough that people will use it (how often have you heard of people buying a backup drive, but then can't be bothered to do backups every week/month/whatever ?) and be significantly better than the "nothing at all" most users would otherwise have.

As a geek, I use both Time Machine and Retrospect so I should have both aspects covered.

[MarkB]

I don't know, but I suspect that eSATA is also faster than FireWire.

It is considerably faster. eSATA is 1.5 or 3Gbps depending on the drive and controller specs, and there's also a 6Gbps standard in use now. Electrically eSATA is just the same as SATA (and SAS), it just has a different and more robust connector.

I agree fully that the interface peak is much faster for eSATA but given that the maximum speed I get off my disk is ~240 to 300Mb/s does eSATA really give a very great real world advantage over FireWire 800?

My experiments have shown that eSATA is clearly faster than USB2, but whether this is intrinsic to the USB2 protocol or limitations in the USB to SATA bridge inside the caddy I'm not sure.

While this not directly MAC related, the backup philosophy may be useful, and it's likely that Time Machine is just an Apple wrapper around rsync and/or rsnapshot (or possibly a re-implementation).

Time Machine is very similar. It creates snapshots done with hard links just like you can do with rsync (and I assume is what you are doing with rsnapshot). As you say, this file-level deduplication is generally fairly efficient on disk usage - unless you are editing lots of large media files which can quickly use up space.

Does sound like essentially the same thing.

The big advantage of Time Machine over other options is the simplicity. It's not very configurable, lacks features many of us more advanced users would like, but it's trivial for even basic users to set up and use. Just plug in a disk, designate it as a Time Machine backup, and let it get on with it. If you want to retrieve a file, just "Enter Time Machine", the background changes to the "warp drive" space background, and you can shuffle back and forth through time and the files as they were at any particular time are displayed as normal in the finder window.

Sounds neat, especially for a graphical interface (unlike my server).

As I said earlier, it's not a substitute for what we would probably call a "proper" backup with multiple generations stored off-side, but it's not intended to be. It's intended to be something simple enough that people will use it (how often have you heard of people buying a backup drive, but then can't be bothered to do backups every week/month/whatever ?) and be significantly better than the "nothing at all" most users would otherwise have.

Fully agree. It sounds like Time Machine and rsnapshot have essentially the same functionality, even if the Apple version has a much slicker interface.

Going for a multiple generation off-site backup for me is overkill, and would work out very expensive (especially with the current price of 3TB disks). Relying on the local snapshots with a single generation remote backup no older than 2 weeks for disaster recovery is a more practical solution.