Hey, I just wanted to say that last time my hdd dropped dead with quite spine-shivering noises, I was saved by GetDataBack. It mocked my HDD for 24-hrs straight, but managed to pull off a couple of gigs of most necessary data (the disc was like 10GB in total - so that was quite some time ago :) ). Have a look - perhaps you'll get lucky!
... you may try what I did. I had 2 spare 160 Gb Hdds and a 2.5" 80 Gb hdd, I bought an inexpensive ITX board (with celeron 220), installed XP on the little disk, patched it to support RAID in disk manager, then configured the 2 larger disks as raid 1. When I'm home and need to access my data I turn on the mini-pc, when I'm not I can turn it on by WOL (it should work over the internet as well, but just to be sure I use PUTTY to connect to my router and send the command from it). Works like a charm. Considering the board, the RAM, the 60W 12V power brick and the (cheap) mini-case I forked out about 150€. It may also work as backup pc and media-server (I installed twonky on it, works great). The only drawback is the 100 Mbit network adapter on board. I guess you may use the PCI slot for that if the case permits.
SSDs are nice, but imho it's too early to depend on them.... It's true, there's no mechanical part in them but: what if they stop working anyway? I guess data recovery costs would go through the roof...
Why didn't you use NFS functionality on it? I think that is a way to go on Mac. NFS is not enabled by default, but can be easily added. I did that on mine (I run Linux at my home mostly). There is a very good page on expanding MyBook functionalities at http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/">http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/.
My division buys us new Dell computers when the warranties run out (usually every 3 years). This summer, I requested a Latitude with the "Ultra Performance SSD" (Samsung FlashSSD SLC drive) and Vista. I knew I was going out on a limb in that almost no one else at the company (a medium-sized corporation) uses Vista or SSDs. This uniqueness means that support from both our Dell Certified IT folks and Dell itself has been a bit more laborious that usual. The first PC came with a stability problem. Dell tried to say that we'd configured the drive access in the BIOS incorrectly. We hadn't changed any settings in the BIOS so I knew that was bogus. Eventually, it crashed enough and we complained enough that it was considered a lemon and Dell sent a whole new system. We never did figure out what was wrong with the first one. Recently, on the new system only 5 months old, Vista reported that the drive was failing and that I should back it up before I lose everything. So, I backed everything up multiple ways since our automated backup system has had some restore issues. Drive access slowed to a crawl, peaking around 5 MB/s in Vista's resource monitor, and the drive access light always showed busy. Dell's diagnostic tests all failed immediately on the drive with similar messages about backing everything up before its lost. The drive survived all this backing up, diagnostic testing, and a few days of regular use without fail, however. I'm not convinced any of these diagnostic tools realize that the drive isn't magnetic. I'm guessing they're explicitly trusting whatever data the SMART system is providing in generating those errors. So, now I'm on my third SLC flash disk on my second PC in 6 months. This system has cost Dell a bundle and a half. I'll bet that if they simply had better diagnostic tools, they could have avoided replacing both the first PC (retail price around $2500) and the second drive ($600 upgrade retail cost). Today, when our tech went to wipe the bad drive for return to Dell, he was at a loss as to how to do it. Drive scrubbers are everywhere for magnetic drives but how do you scrub the data on a FlashSSD when the data recovery methods aren't even well understood, yet?
The moral: Yes SSDs should be more reliable but the diagnostics and support aren't there for them, yet. Despite their extremely high cost and all the technical reasons why they should fail less, in userland, you may be trading the devil you know for the devil you don't.
Sorry to hear about that Derek...same thing happened to our home PC a few years back. Lost all of our digital pictures. That's why I swear by RAID1 in my desktop now, but that obviously doesn't protect from accidental deletion, fire, etc. My current solution is a schedule/automated SyncToy job which copies the directories I care about once a week onto my HP NAS which also doubles as primary storage for media files. My NAS also came with some sort of "ghost" type of backup application that I haven't played with yet, but I suppose if you wanted to just capture an image of the drive then that would be the way to go.
Although the NAS solves the problem of having multiple copies, I am a bit worried about having both sets of data in my house. Haven't decided what I want to do yet, but I'm leaning towards periodically pulling one of my RAID1 disks and storing that offsite somewhere (maybe a close friend's/family, safety deposit box, etc). Then I would just re-mirror the array with a 3rd disk. You could keep an rotation going indefinitely.
FYI - I eventually paid to have the data recovered a few years later and it cost me about $1800. A big chunk of change for sure, but I learned my lesson. Also, if you do decide to have someone look at it and they tell you it's "not repairable", take it for a 2nd opinion. Took me 2 tries...first place I took it to said it was not repairable, but a 2nd vendor had no problems. Go figure.
If I were you I'd look into Windows Home Server instead of NAS.
It provides remote centralized storage, automated daily backups (it even wakes your pcs from standby and puts them back in sleep when it's done) and optional folder duplication for extra assurance.
WHS is teh sexx0r. In addition to automated backups with bare metal restore capability, it also gives you secure remote (WAN) access to your data, acts as an RDP proxy for your other systems, and can do a host of other tasks.
First, I would like to say that I spent the better part of a year benchmarking every single 'shared storage protocol' that I knew of. This includes Samba, NFS, iSCSI, AoE, FTP, Windows standard file sharing, and a few others I am probably forgetting about. They are all slower than I personally like. FTP probably was the fastest I tested (~60MB/s), but like every other protocol, speed depends on disk block size vs the file size of said transfer. Disk setup made no difference, and even using a 4x RAID0 array made very little difference in performance. Keep in mind, I would never use RAID0 as a backup solution, but I wanted to test for maximum possible speed. At one point, I had iSCSI, and XFS setup on a Linux box that came close to ~55MB/s. Said install was too unreliable however, because of between the keyboard and chair error, or just OSS issues. What it came down to was that I was not seeing this marvelous speed increase from using GbE controllers. I tested all sorts of possibilities, including Intel GbE pro adapters, and had to finally call no joy.
After having the above results put a damper on my ideas, I came up with 3 possibilities to achieve what I wanted. a) Buy an expensive SAS controller along with a few 'enterprise' grade SATA drives. b) Use eSATA in one of many forms, including port multipliers, or multi-lane singles. c) Put extra HDDs in my desktop system, and use these with some form of automated backup.
Where I am currently at right now personally is 'c'. I have a total of 3TB of drives ( all Seagates mind you ) in my main desktop system. I use a program called DeltaCopy (freeware) which is kind of a Windows rsync port. Microsoft also has a similar tool called SyncToy. Anyhow, the idea here is that I get local single disk speeds, and I can use DeltaCopy to sync multiple target sources, to a single or multiple target backup locations. Also, I do keep all my data files under the 'My Documents' directory, but I have since moved this directory off of the main OS drive. With DeltaCopy backing up my important files to two other locations, this means I have 3 total copies of each said file. This means I could have two drive failures, and still an intact copy. Also since I am not using RAID1, this means I can use the rest of the drive(s) to store whatever I want; short term, or long term.
Now thinking of the Macbook perspective, unless you have the funds, and ability to use an eSATA cardbus adapter, you're pretty much stuck with USB, firewire, or ethernet. USB, and ethernet are going to perform similar, so if you want the best possible speeds, firewire, or eSATA are your only two real options. Personally when given the choice between USB, or ethernet, I would use USB every single time just based on costs. Ethernet drives can come in handy however if you do not like moving an external drive around from machine to machine, but still that can also be an advantage.
As for SSD's . . . they are cost prohibitive. Being a speed junky, I would be more than happy to own/use said devices for said purposes. Also, be aware unless you're using an external hardware solution, your speeds are not going to be any better. Reliability ? Seagate is still conducting their studies on them, so the verdict is still unknown.
I would go with NAS first, and SSD later; although a mechanical hard drive failure has NEVER occurred with my computers...
Now, I have to say that I CANNOT FREAKIN' BELIEVE that you, one of my computer geeks-wizard-heroes, does not have a backup system setup!!! It is unforgivable, if I were your wife I would order you to sleep on the sofa for a whole month!!! LOL!
Do yourself a favor and have a look at FreeNAS. Like your LaCie it can speak many protocols (including AFP), and can be run on any PC that you can hook any hard drives to.
It allows full software RAID 0,1, or 5 (you'll want 1 or 5 for redundancy) to project your data on the NAS from failure.
Best of all, the software is free, and the hardware can pretty much be whatever you have lying around.
On the redundant and easy to use front, there's Drobo or ReadyNAS, but they are both fairly expensive to get started with. The advantage to both those devices is their ability to dynamically expand the RAID simply by adding new drives.
Looks like most people feel going with a NAS backup solution initially was the best way to go for many of the same reasons I made that decision.
I find it interesting that people would rather trust the failure rates of mechanical drives over the as of yet unproven SSD drives. Granted, MTBF is tough to establish in a new market, but it is only a given that SSDs will fail after a certain number of writes ... I know with Intel's drives at least, the device will not allow any more data to be written to the device at the point where integrity could be compromised. This means, while your drive may fail, you will not lose your data, which can be copied to another drive even after failure.
Beyond that, under constant load (or just being on) mechanical drives degrade themselves toward failure. even if nothing is being accessed, while the platters are spinning, the life of the drive is ticking away.
It isn't just an issue of resilience to physical trauma or performance -- even though it hasn't been tested, there is no reason to suspect that SSD devices will have as incredibly low a (real) MTBF as mechanical drives.
Yes, things can go wrong. There could be controller issues or OS problems or even internal logic to the device that may cause issue. We see that the Intel controller solution, in our initial testing, is much more mature and sensible than the JMicron controllers in most other drives. But even the intel drive could have problems, especially with earlier firmware.
But from my experience over the years, I'd still rather go with the SSD and take my chances, especially after we see second and third generation SSDs start to hit the market.
Though, more to the point of this, it may be worth it to forego the SSD. I think it's a better option than the mechanical drive, but I get that it can't beat more backups in more places.
While I'm not interested in online backup or storage, I do see the wisdom in going with more redundancy. Based on all this feedback, instead of an SSD we may go with a smaller/cheaper external USB 2.0 or Firewire 800 disk for backing up just final versions of essential data. We could keep this in our lock box. Wouldn't save it from everything, but unless a hardcore accelerant is used we'd still have our data after a fire.
Derek, my suggestion would be to use USB 2.0, or firewire 1394a. The problem with firewire 1394b is that it is too costly, and finding a reliable product can be an issue. I personally own several USB 2.0 enclosures, and while they perform ok (~24MB/s), a firewire 1394a external drive will out perform these greatly.
If you're unaware of Addonics check out their site: http://www.addonics.com/">http://www.addonics.com/ . If you're like me, and picky with whom you deal with over the internet (concerning purchases), Provantage whom I have personally dealt with many times is very reputable. Provantage normally carries several Addonics devices in stock. http://www.provantage.com/">http://www.provantage.com/ Anyhow, Addonics probably has something that could work great for your situation.
I don't doubt the longevity of decent SSDs, but IMO they are simply too expensive right now to justify purchase of that over another data backup option. The only hard drive I have personally seen fail was a Maxtor in a Shuttle case with a P4 Prescott (was able to recover the data booting from a Knoppix LiveCD and transferring to USB), and apparently something else failed at the same time as I could not successfully install Windows to a new hard drive after we purchased it. For a laptop with only one hard drive slot, I'd call a 64GB drive too small, and all current prices on non-JMicron drives over that capacity are very high.
I've had almost as many crashes on OSX as Windows over the past few years, despite far more use of Windows.
SSD is a good option, but by itself it's not enough for data backup. You still need a redundant backup solution.
If you can do both, then use SSDs and have a redundant backup as well. But if you can only afford one solution right now, start with the redundant backup, and save up for the SSD.
I had a western digital external hard drive fail on me not too long ago, I would turn it on and it would make the click, click noise of death. I expected I was screwed, but I tried this program called Power Data recovery. http://www.eofsoft.com/">http://www.eofsoft.com/ Even though windows, and various other hard drive tools thought that there wasn't even any formatted space on the drive with this program I was able to recover ALL my data. I even had multiple copies of things from erase and rewrites. It was a 160GB drive and I think I had around 240GB taken off of it. Your drive only needs to physically work once more, it took me a few try's of plugging it in and turning it on but it finally worked for me. I can't even explain the feeling of relief it was so great. And it's WAY less expensive than paying a company to do it for you.
tried recovering data -- bios / efi does not detect the drive. there is no way to get to the disk for any software to try anything. we would need physical recovery. and i don't have a spare clean room laying around or I might try it myself :-)
I've had success using Mozy.com to backup online. They make a mac version and you can backup 2GB for free. Backups can be set to occur multiple times per day. Worth a look to see if it fits your situation.
I second the recommendation for Mozy. I use it for backing up my wife's desktop and my own. For years I was using rsync to a NAS, but the piece of mind of having off site storage is worth far more than $5/month.
Some users have reported trouble restoring files. I have not, but I haven't needed to do a large restore yet, either.
Be sure to search for coupons, you can save 10% or 20% off of a 2-year subscription.
May be in a Decade or so. We need at least 100Mbit upload and Online backup to be cheap enough.
WHS or NAS do not use 80W all the time. Most of the time it only uses 20W. Not to mention NAS provide much more function compare to Online backup. And the it seems Electricity in US is awfully expensive compare to rest of the world.
Therefore what we need is Affordable, Fast NAS. Which we are still severely lacking. We need at least 4 Disk, ZFS based Home Server.
What hardware would you be using to idle at 20w? The lowest measured power consumption over at SPCR is 31w for AMD desktop systems and 35w for Intel desktop systems. In another review the NAS "Thecus N4100 PRO" idled at around 40w.
As for the price of electricity, the current spot price in Sweden is pretty much exactly the same (SEK 0.989 ~= USD 0.126). During summer the price is usually lower though.
And.. there are people with 100Mbit connections at home, but sure, I'd never backup more than a select few folders online due to the storage limitations/costs.
I'd say redundancy is the key, multiple copies in multiple locations.
Get a dual disk NAS and go raid 1, then use some online service as well to get an offsite backup.
You'd have to have some seriously bad luck if all four copies (including the original) would die at the same time.
Regarding going "all out", it actually doesn't have to be very expensive, just yesterday I ordered parts for a NAS/home server, which should idle at around 35-45w (SPCR measured 31w idle with this board and CPU), running on a mATX 740G-chipset (Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2H) with an AMD X2 4850e (45w TDP), a big heatsink for passively cooling the CPU and 4gb ram. Without harddrives and a chassis the price was less than SEK 2500 (approx. USD 310), which is much less than most 4-drive NAS solutions, especially with comparable speeds.
Go with an inexpensive, low power platform like Geode, C7, or Atom. Most MB+CPU combos come in less than $100 or $150 for a complete barebone. Something like an MSI Wind, currently $140 at NewEgg, would work if you didn't want to build from scratch yourself. Put any capacity SO-DIMM stick of DDR2 you have or can get cheap in it. Then add 2 SATA drives in it, and run the drives in software Raid 1. It has built in gigabit and a CF adapter if you don't want to boot from the array. For $300 you can have redundant storage of 500-750GB that's accessible from any computer on your network via a number of protocols. I don't like the prebuilt NAS stuff because you're left with so little control over things. I'd much rather put a linux distro on there myself and open up a lot of options.
Flash SSD endurance is insufficiently tested over a long period of time. I would setup a NAS with 3x 500or640 (2 platters per drive) in RAID5 using Openfiler and plugged into 1500VA UPS. Add a 1or1.5TB for periodic mirroring or backup of the RAID5 array as needed.
If choosing flash SSD, buy the largest size possible and keep it relatively empty and unchanging.
Why not an automated online backup of the folders she keeps art, pics, etc? Seems a lot cheaper than multiple hard drives, and there's no need for a non-enthusiast to spend time worrying about cables and wiring.
A disk that can't fail will never, ever replace backups. if you have important data, you can't rely on operating system, other hardware and user to never fail. It's as simple as that. My only data loss situation occurred years ago when HDD controller hit a bug and went berserk. SSDs wouldn't have helped me there a bit. As I have worked years as a systems engineer, I've seen plenty of cases where data has been erased accidentally. SSD's would've been worthless there, too.
You need your backups, your wife needs backups and I need my backups. SSD's and mirrored disks and whatnot will help in only one of all the failure scenarios, give you false sense of security and leave you exposed. And if you take your backups seriously, you should try restoring them every once in a while.
NAS is the simplest. You can set the lappy to auto sync everytime she brings it home, then you are done.
Offsite backup via one of these online storage sites is the next easiest. It will go automatically too, but can take a very long time depending on the amount of data changed daily.
CD/DVD backups is possible, but they are going to be a pain to manually run/burn.
SSD isnt a backup at all. It may provide longer life, but there's no track record for reliability yet.
If you want the "protection" of flash, try making her backup to a thumb drive. You can get 16GB these days for $40 online. That may not be enough space.
Depending on the size and the value of your data, you may want to consider an online backup system such as JungleDisk ($0.15/GB/month).
I used to run a Windows Home Server box to do all my backup. Using a Kill-A-Watt, I measured its power consumption and it was around 80w. If you multiply this out, you get: 80w * 24h/day * 30day/mo = 57.6kw. At $0.12/kw local electric rates, I was paying around $7/mo just for the electricity to run my backups. For that amount of money, I was able to backup 46GB of data online via Jungledisk.
A NAS can crash just as well as a drive in a PC, and it costs $/month in electric bills. If your content is not huge (few 10s of GB or less) it may be cheaper to use an online service. Online backup is also way more reliable (if your house burns down, you lose both your laptop and your NAS - but Amazon S3 doesn't burn down).
You could always pick up a NAS with a built in RAID 0/1 solution. Many of the external boxes support Gigabit ethernet as well as multiple USB connectors.
You could even upgrade the internal drives to SSDs eventually.
I definitely would have gone with your direction here in picking up the NAS first. SSDs wouldn't have even been in my top 3 list of choices if I were looking at means of backing up my data. There are a couple of reasons for that, which you have already happened upon in your search: 1) Price- when compared to HDDs...well there isn't much of a comparison 2) Space- again, they just can't compare with your classic HDD without prices getting ridiculous.
Another area for concern, especially when you'll be using this specifically for backups, is reliability. SSD is still a largely new and uncharted technology when it comes to overall lifespan and MTBF. Yes the parts inside them have been used in SD cards and mp3 players for years, but those applications aren't typically as high-stress as being a full-time storage device, where there are multiple read/write operations going on constantly. Yes they are 10000x more shock resistant than a harddisk, but what about electrical wear on the chips themselves? When you ask how long you should expect your new SSD to last, your response might just be "Umm..until it dies?". I realize HDDs might be just as cloudy when it comes to that question, but at least the tech is proven and there ARE fallbacks such as physical data recovery should a disaster happen. That gets a lot more tricky dealing with a physically failing SSD.
I think your choice to go with NAS first is by far the better one. You have storage available to you from anywhere if you want it to be so, you have oodles of space to play with, and it's cost-effective. My next choice would have been simply to go with optical media and burn a DVD every so often, which isn't automated, takes time, and requires a person to remember to go ahead and do it, but it's cheap as dirt and it works. My third choice would have been to go for a fully fledged storage server with RAID redundancy, UPS, the whole nine yards. The only reason that's not my #1 is because it can get pricey if you go all out. You already seemed to have ruled out using an external HD, but that would have been #4. Then maybe SSDs.
SSDs are targeted at the people who want it for the performance they offer, the power savings, and possibly weight in the case of laptops, cost be damned. Data backup should be all about reliability, storage density, and maximizing your budget, not performance - hell a ton of businesses still use tape backups! Don't expect them to break any speed records any time soon.
PS- Hope the 'pack gets to taste Knight blood today! ACC needs all the bowls they can get.
Derek: If you're looking for foolproof, just keep it simple:
- Keep using a regular HDD on the computer.
- Set up backup of specified directories (or whatever) at regular intervals (daily, weekly, whatever) to two external (usb) hdd's.
Just connect, copy, disconnect, repeat with the other drive. Keep one of the drives at relatives/friends.
A bit cumbersome, yes, but I'm sure both of you see the value of spending a bit of time on this.
The NAS is a cheaper solution as a whole based off pure GBs in addition to functionality. Plus the NAS provides the first tenet of data protection...Redundancy.
The SSD is also a great solution, but even a SSD can (and eventually) will fail, it's just far less dramatic of a failure.
The way I see it is like curing a disease versus managing the symptoms. A NAS (actually scheduled backups in general) cures the disease of data-loss with redundancy. The SSD manages the symptom of unreliable copies of data. Good luck and hope the new setup gets your wife back into creating.
We’ve updated our terms. By continuing to use the site and/or by logging into your account, you agree to the Site’s updated Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
34 Comments
Back to Article
Iger - Thursday, January 15, 2009 - link
Hey, I just wanted to say that last time my hdd dropped dead with quite spine-shivering noises, I was saved by GetDataBack. It mocked my HDD for 24-hrs straight, but managed to pull off a couple of gigs of most necessary data (the disc was like 10GB in total - so that was quite some time ago :) ). Have a look - perhaps you'll get lucky!http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm">http://www.runtime.org/data-recovery-software.htm
Denithor - Sunday, January 4, 2009 - link
Did you try this one? Often works for a "dead" drive, at least long enough to grab data onto a laptop.Put drive in ziplock back in freezer overnight. Plug in long USB & power cables, put back in freezer and try to access while it's in the freezer.
zOs - Sunday, January 4, 2009 - link
... you may try what I did. I had 2 spare 160 Gb Hdds and a 2.5" 80 Gb hdd, I bought an inexpensive ITX board (with celeron 220), installed XP on the little disk, patched it to support RAID in disk manager, then configured the 2 larger disks as raid 1. When I'm home and need to access my data I turn on the mini-pc, when I'm not I can turn it on by WOL (it should work over the internet as well, but just to be sure I use PUTTY to connect to my router and send the command from it). Works like a charm. Considering the board, the RAM, the 60W 12V power brick and the (cheap) mini-case I forked out about 150€. It may also work as backup pc and media-server (I installed twonky on it, works great). The only drawback is the 100 Mbit network adapter on board. I guess you may use the PCI slot for that if the case permits.SSDs are nice, but imho it's too early to depend on them.... It's true, there's no mechanical part in them but: what if they stop working anyway? I guess data recovery costs would go through the roof...
simonv - Saturday, January 3, 2009 - link
Only a question on WD MyBook.Why didn't you use NFS functionality on it? I think that is a way to go on Mac. NFS is not enabled by default, but can be easily added. I did that on mine (I run Linux at my home mostly). There is a very good page on expanding MyBook functionalities at http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/">http://mybookworld.wikidot.com/.
heulenwolf - Wednesday, December 31, 2008 - link
Derek,My division buys us new Dell computers when the warranties run out (usually every 3 years). This summer, I requested a Latitude with the "Ultra Performance SSD" (Samsung FlashSSD SLC drive) and Vista. I knew I was going out on a limb in that almost no one else at the company (a medium-sized corporation) uses Vista or SSDs. This uniqueness means that support from both our Dell Certified IT folks and Dell itself has been a bit more laborious that usual. The first PC came with a stability problem. Dell tried to say that we'd configured the drive access in the BIOS incorrectly. We hadn't changed any settings in the BIOS so I knew that was bogus. Eventually, it crashed enough and we complained enough that it was considered a lemon and Dell sent a whole new system. We never did figure out what was wrong with the first one. Recently, on the new system only 5 months old, Vista reported that the drive was failing and that I should back it up before I lose everything. So, I backed everything up multiple ways since our automated backup system has had some restore issues. Drive access slowed to a crawl, peaking around 5 MB/s in Vista's resource monitor, and the drive access light always showed busy. Dell's diagnostic tests all failed immediately on the drive with similar messages about backing everything up before its lost. The drive survived all this backing up, diagnostic testing, and a few days of regular use without fail, however. I'm not convinced any of these diagnostic tools realize that the drive isn't magnetic. I'm guessing they're explicitly trusting whatever data the SMART system is providing in generating those errors. So, now I'm on my third SLC flash disk on my second PC in 6 months. This system has cost Dell a bundle and a half. I'll bet that if they simply had better diagnostic tools, they could have avoided replacing both the first PC (retail price around $2500) and the second drive ($600 upgrade retail cost). Today, when our tech went to wipe the bad drive for return to Dell, he was at a loss as to how to do it. Drive scrubbers are everywhere for magnetic drives but how do you scrub the data on a FlashSSD when the data recovery methods aren't even well understood, yet?
The moral: Yes SSDs should be more reliable but the diagnostics and support aren't there for them, yet. Despite their extremely high cost and all the technical reasons why they should fail less, in userland, you may be trading the devil you know for the devil you don't.
subflava - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 - link
Sorry to hear about that Derek...same thing happened to our home PC a few years back. Lost all of our digital pictures. That's why I swear by RAID1 in my desktop now, but that obviously doesn't protect from accidental deletion, fire, etc. My current solution is a schedule/automated SyncToy job which copies the directories I care about once a week onto my HP NAS which also doubles as primary storage for media files. My NAS also came with some sort of "ghost" type of backup application that I haven't played with yet, but I suppose if you wanted to just capture an image of the drive then that would be the way to go.Although the NAS solves the problem of having multiple copies, I am a bit worried about having both sets of data in my house. Haven't decided what I want to do yet, but I'm leaning towards periodically pulling one of my RAID1 disks and storing that offsite somewhere (maybe a close friend's/family, safety deposit box, etc). Then I would just re-mirror the array with a 3rd disk. You could keep an rotation going indefinitely.
FYI - I eventually paid to have the data recovered a few years later and it cost me about $1800. A big chunk of change for sure, but I learned my lesson. Also, if you do decide to have someone look at it and they tell you it's "not repairable", take it for a 2nd opinion. Took me 2 tries...first place I took it to said it was not repairable, but a 2nd vendor had no problems. Go figure.
Olyros - Wednesday, December 31, 2008 - link
If I were you I'd look into Windows Home Server instead of NAS.It provides remote centralized storage, automated daily backups (it even wakes your pcs from standby and puts them back in sleep when it's done) and optional folder duplication for extra assurance.
You can check this http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/archive/2008/1...">http://blogs.technet.com/homeserver/arc.../2008/12... for a more detailed description.
Gholam - Wednesday, December 31, 2008 - link
WHS is teh sexx0r. In addition to automated backups with bare metal restore capability, it also gives you secure remote (WAN) access to your data, acts as an RDP proxy for your other systems, and can do a host of other tasks.yyrkoon - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 - link
First, I would like to say that I spent the better part of a year benchmarking every single 'shared storage protocol' that I knew of. This includes Samba, NFS, iSCSI, AoE, FTP, Windows standard file sharing, and a few others I am probably forgetting about. They are all slower than I personally like. FTP probably was the fastest I tested (~60MB/s), but like every other protocol, speed depends on disk block size vs the file size of said transfer. Disk setup made no difference, and even using a 4x RAID0 array made very little difference in performance. Keep in mind, I would never use RAID0 as a backup solution, but I wanted to test for maximum possible speed. At one point, I had iSCSI, and XFS setup on a Linux box that came close to ~55MB/s. Said install was too unreliable however, because of between the keyboard and chair error, or just OSS issues. What it came down to was that I was not seeing this marvelous speed increase from using GbE controllers. I tested all sorts of possibilities, including Intel GbE pro adapters, and had to finally call no joy.After having the above results put a damper on my ideas, I came up with 3 possibilities to achieve what I wanted. a) Buy an expensive SAS controller along with a few 'enterprise' grade SATA drives. b) Use eSATA in one of many forms, including port multipliers, or multi-lane singles. c) Put extra HDDs in my desktop system, and use these with some form of automated backup.
Where I am currently at right now personally is 'c'. I have a total of 3TB of drives ( all Seagates mind you ) in my main desktop system. I use a program called DeltaCopy (freeware) which is kind of a Windows rsync port. Microsoft also has a similar tool called SyncToy. Anyhow, the idea here is that I get local single disk speeds, and I can use DeltaCopy to sync multiple target sources, to a single or multiple target backup locations. Also, I do keep all my data files under the 'My Documents' directory, but I have since moved this directory off of the main OS drive. With DeltaCopy backing up my important files to two other locations, this means I have 3 total copies of each said file. This means I could have two drive failures, and still an intact copy. Also since I am not using RAID1, this means I can use the rest of the drive(s) to store whatever I want; short term, or long term.
Now thinking of the Macbook perspective, unless you have the funds, and ability to use an eSATA cardbus adapter, you're pretty much stuck with USB, firewire, or ethernet. USB, and ethernet are going to perform similar, so if you want the best possible speeds, firewire, or eSATA are your only two real options. Personally when given the choice between USB, or ethernet, I would use USB every single time just based on costs. Ethernet drives can come in handy however if you do not like moving an external drive around from machine to machine, but still that can also be an advantage.
As for SSD's . . . they are cost prohibitive. Being a speed junky, I would be more than happy to own/use said devices for said purposes. Also, be aware unless you're using an external hardware solution, your speeds are not going to be any better. Reliability ? Seagate is still conducting their studies on them, so the verdict is still unknown.
CheapFlyer - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 - link
WHS is the best $99 backup plan I have ever used. If you have multiple computers in the house this is a no brainer.Although you can restore any Windows based PC in short order, you can only use it as shared network storage on the Mac (as far as I know at least).
michaeljonas - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 - link
I would go with NAS first, and SSD later; although a mechanical hard drive failure has NEVER occurred with my computers...Now, I have to say that I CANNOT FREAKIN' BELIEVE that you, one of my computer geeks-wizard-heroes, does not have a backup system setup!!! It is unforgivable, if I were your wife I would order you to sleep on the sofa for a whole month!!! LOL!
comedian - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 - link
Do yourself a favor and have a look at FreeNAS. Like your LaCie it can speak many protocols (including AFP), and can be run on any PC that you can hook any hard drives to.It allows full software RAID 0,1, or 5 (you'll want 1 or 5 for redundancy) to project your data on the NAS from failure.
Best of all, the software is free, and the hardware can pretty much be whatever you have lying around.
On the redundant and easy to use front, there's Drobo or ReadyNAS, but they are both fairly expensive to get started with. The advantage to both those devices is their ability to dynamically expand the RAID simply by adding new drives.
DerekWilson - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 - link
Looks like most people feel going with a NAS backup solution initially was the best way to go for many of the same reasons I made that decision.I find it interesting that people would rather trust the failure rates of mechanical drives over the as of yet unproven SSD drives. Granted, MTBF is tough to establish in a new market, but it is only a given that SSDs will fail after a certain number of writes ... I know with Intel's drives at least, the device will not allow any more data to be written to the device at the point where integrity could be compromised. This means, while your drive may fail, you will not lose your data, which can be copied to another drive even after failure.
Beyond that, under constant load (or just being on) mechanical drives degrade themselves toward failure. even if nothing is being accessed, while the platters are spinning, the life of the drive is ticking away.
It isn't just an issue of resilience to physical trauma or performance -- even though it hasn't been tested, there is no reason to suspect that SSD devices will have as incredibly low a (real) MTBF as mechanical drives.
Yes, things can go wrong. There could be controller issues or OS problems or even internal logic to the device that may cause issue. We see that the Intel controller solution, in our initial testing, is much more mature and sensible than the JMicron controllers in most other drives. But even the intel drive could have problems, especially with earlier firmware.
But from my experience over the years, I'd still rather go with the SSD and take my chances, especially after we see second and third generation SSDs start to hit the market.
Though, more to the point of this, it may be worth it to forego the SSD. I think it's a better option than the mechanical drive, but I get that it can't beat more backups in more places.
While I'm not interested in online backup or storage, I do see the wisdom in going with more redundancy. Based on all this feedback, instead of an SSD we may go with a smaller/cheaper external USB 2.0 or Firewire 800 disk for backing up just final versions of essential data. We could keep this in our lock box. Wouldn't save it from everything, but unless a hardcore accelerant is used we'd still have our data after a fire.
yyrkoon - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 - link
Derek, my suggestion would be to use USB 2.0, or firewire 1394a. The problem with firewire 1394b is that it is too costly, and finding a reliable product can be an issue. I personally own several USB 2.0 enclosures, and while they perform ok (~24MB/s), a firewire 1394a external drive will out perform these greatly.If you're unaware of Addonics check out their site: http://www.addonics.com/">http://www.addonics.com/ . If you're like me, and picky with whom you deal with over the internet (concerning purchases), Provantage whom I have personally dealt with many times is very reputable. Provantage normally carries several Addonics devices in stock. http://www.provantage.com/">http://www.provantage.com/ Anyhow, Addonics probably has something that could work great for your situation.
strikeback03 - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 - link
I don't doubt the longevity of decent SSDs, but IMO they are simply too expensive right now to justify purchase of that over another data backup option. The only hard drive I have personally seen fail was a Maxtor in a Shuttle case with a P4 Prescott (was able to recover the data booting from a Knoppix LiveCD and transferring to USB), and apparently something else failed at the same time as I could not successfully install Windows to a new hard drive after we purchased it. For a laptop with only one hard drive slot, I'd call a 64GB drive too small, and all current prices on non-JMicron drives over that capacity are very high.I've had almost as many crashes on OSX as Windows over the past few years, despite far more use of Windows.
crimson117 - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 - link
SSD is a good option, but by itself it's not enough for data backup. You still need a redundant backup solution.If you can do both, then use SSDs and have a redundant backup as well. But if you can only afford one solution right now, start with the redundant backup, and save up for the SSD.
Hrel - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 - link
I had a western digital external hard drive fail on me not too long ago, I would turn it on and it would make the click, click noise of death. I expected I was screwed, but I tried this program called Power Data recovery. http://www.eofsoft.com/">http://www.eofsoft.com/ Even though windows, and various other hard drive tools thought that there wasn't even any formatted space on the drive with this program I was able to recover ALL my data. I even had multiple copies of things from erase and rewrites. It was a 160GB drive and I think I had around 240GB taken off of it. Your drive only needs to physically work once more, it took me a few try's of plugging it in and turning it on but it finally worked for me. I can't even explain the feeling of relief it was so great. And it's WAY less expensive than paying a company to do it for you.DerekWilson - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 - link
tried recovering data -- bios / efi does not detect the drive. there is no way to get to the disk for any software to try anything. we would need physical recovery. and i don't have a spare clean room laying around or I might try it myself :-)RoddyMike - Monday, December 29, 2008 - link
I've had success using Mozy.com to backup online. They make a mac version and you can backup 2GB for free. Backups can be set to occur multiple times per day. Worth a look to see if it fits your situation.bhigh - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 - link
I second the recommendation for Mozy. I use it for backing up my wife's desktop and my own. For years I was using rsync to a NAS, but the piece of mind of having off site storage is worth far more than $5/month.Some users have reported trouble restoring files. I have not, but I haven't needed to do a large restore yet, either.
Be sure to search for coupons, you can save 10% or 20% off of a 2-year subscription.
iwodo - Monday, December 29, 2008 - link
May be in a Decade or so. We need at least 100Mbit upload and Online backup to be cheap enough.WHS or NAS do not use 80W all the time. Most of the time it only uses 20W. Not to mention NAS provide much more function compare to Online backup. And the it seems Electricity in US is awfully expensive compare to rest of the world.
Therefore what we need is Affordable, Fast NAS. Which we are still severely lacking. We need at least 4 Disk, ZFS based Home Server.
idomagic - Tuesday, December 30, 2008 - link
What hardware would you be using to idle at 20w? The lowest measured power consumption over at SPCR is 31w for AMD desktop systems and 35w for Intel desktop systems. In another review the NAS "Thecus N4100 PRO" idled at around 40w.As for the price of electricity, the current spot price in Sweden is pretty much exactly the same (SEK 0.989 ~= USD 0.126). During summer the price is usually lower though.
And.. there are people with 100Mbit connections at home, but sure, I'd never backup more than a select few folders online due to the storage limitations/costs.
idomagic - Monday, December 29, 2008 - link
I'd say redundancy is the key, multiple copies in multiple locations.Get a dual disk NAS and go raid 1, then use some online service as well to get an offsite backup.
You'd have to have some seriously bad luck if all four copies (including the original) would die at the same time.
Regarding going "all out", it actually doesn't have to be very expensive, just yesterday I ordered parts for a NAS/home server, which should idle at around 35-45w (SPCR measured 31w idle with this board and CPU), running on a mATX 740G-chipset (Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2H) with an AMD X2 4850e (45w TDP), a big heatsink for passively cooling the CPU and 4gb ram. Without harddrives and a chassis the price was less than SEK 2500 (approx. USD 310), which is much less than most 4-drive NAS solutions, especially with comparable speeds.
WillR - Wednesday, January 14, 2009 - link
I second this.Go with an inexpensive, low power platform like Geode, C7, or Atom. Most MB+CPU combos come in less than $100 or $150 for a complete barebone. Something like an MSI Wind, currently $140 at NewEgg, would work if you didn't want to build from scratch yourself. Put any capacity SO-DIMM stick of DDR2 you have or can get cheap in it. Then add 2 SATA drives in it, and run the drives in software Raid 1. It has built in gigabit and a CF adapter if you don't want to boot from the array. For $300 you can have redundant storage of 500-750GB that's accessible from any computer on your network via a number of protocols. I don't like the prebuilt NAS stuff because you're left with so little control over things. I'd much rather put a linux distro on there myself and open up a lot of options.
mkchiu - Monday, December 29, 2008 - link
Flash SSD endurance is insufficiently tested over a long period of time. I would setup a NAS with 3x 500or640 (2 platters per drive) in RAID5 using Openfiler and plugged into 1500VA UPS. Add a 1or1.5TB for periodic mirroring or backup of the RAID5 array as needed.If choosing flash SSD, buy the largest size possible and keep it relatively empty and unchanging.
Sunrise089 - Monday, December 29, 2008 - link
Why not an automated online backup of the folders she keeps art, pics, etc? Seems a lot cheaper than multiple hard drives, and there's no need for a non-enthusiast to spend time worrying about cables and wiring.azf - Monday, December 29, 2008 - link
A disk that can't fail will never, ever replace backups. if you have important data, you can't rely on operating system, other hardware and user to never fail. It's as simple as that. My only data loss situation occurred years ago when HDD controller hit a bug and went berserk. SSDs wouldn't have helped me there a bit. As I have worked years as a systems engineer, I've seen plenty of cases where data has been erased accidentally. SSD's would've been worthless there, too.You need your backups, your wife needs backups and I need my backups. SSD's and mirrored disks and whatnot will help in only one of all the failure scenarios, give you false sense of security and leave you exposed. And if you take your backups seriously, you should try restoring them every once in a while.
edborden - Monday, December 29, 2008 - link
I bought an Intel NAS for the very purpose of trying to do the due diligence so my wife wouldn't have to go through this. An Intel software error was the first step on a horrible trip through the data recovery industry that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. I blogged the whole experience in two posts::http://www.edbordenblog.com/2008/04/intel-nas-raid...">http://www.edbordenblog.com/2008/04/intel-nas-raid...
http://www.edbordenblog.com/2008/11/data-recovery-...">http://www.edbordenblog.com/2008/11/data-recovery-...
StraightPipe - Monday, December 29, 2008 - link
NAS is the simplest. You can set the lappy to auto sync everytime she brings it home, then you are done.Offsite backup via one of these online storage sites is the next easiest. It will go automatically too, but can take a very long time depending on the amount of data changed daily.
CD/DVD backups is possible, but they are going to be a pain to manually run/burn.
SSD isnt a backup at all. It may provide longer life, but there's no track record for reliability yet.
If you want the "protection" of flash, try making her backup to a thumb drive. You can get 16GB these days for $40 online. That may not be enough space.
fnord123 - Monday, December 29, 2008 - link
Depending on the size and the value of your data, you may want to consider an online backup system such as JungleDisk ($0.15/GB/month).I used to run a Windows Home Server box to do all my backup. Using a Kill-A-Watt, I measured its power consumption and it was around 80w. If you multiply this out, you get: 80w * 24h/day * 30day/mo = 57.6kw. At $0.12/kw local electric rates, I was paying around $7/mo just for the electricity to run my backups. For that amount of money, I was able to backup 46GB of data online via Jungledisk.
A NAS can crash just as well as a drive in a PC, and it costs $/month in electric bills. If your content is not huge (few 10s of GB or less) it may be cheaper to use an online service. Online backup is also way more reliable (if your house burns down, you lose both your laptop and your NAS - but Amazon S3 doesn't burn down).
blyxx86 - Monday, December 29, 2008 - link
You could always pick up a NAS with a built in RAID 0/1 solution. Many of the external boxes support Gigabit ethernet as well as multiple USB connectors.You could even upgrade the internal drives to SSDs eventually.
SilentSin - Monday, December 29, 2008 - link
I definitely would have gone with your direction here in picking up the NAS first. SSDs wouldn't have even been in my top 3 list of choices if I were looking at means of backing up my data. There are a couple of reasons for that, which you have already happened upon in your search: 1) Price- when compared to HDDs...well there isn't much of a comparison 2) Space- again, they just can't compare with your classic HDD without prices getting ridiculous.Another area for concern, especially when you'll be using this specifically for backups, is reliability. SSD is still a largely new and uncharted technology when it comes to overall lifespan and MTBF. Yes the parts inside them have been used in SD cards and mp3 players for years, but those applications aren't typically as high-stress as being a full-time storage device, where there are multiple read/write operations going on constantly. Yes they are 10000x more shock resistant than a harddisk, but what about electrical wear on the chips themselves? When you ask how long you should expect your new SSD to last, your response might just be "Umm..until it dies?". I realize HDDs might be just as cloudy when it comes to that question, but at least the tech is proven and there ARE fallbacks such as physical data recovery should a disaster happen. That gets a lot more tricky dealing with a physically failing SSD.
I think your choice to go with NAS first is by far the better one. You have storage available to you from anywhere if you want it to be so, you have oodles of space to play with, and it's cost-effective. My next choice would have been simply to go with optical media and burn a DVD every so often, which isn't automated, takes time, and requires a person to remember to go ahead and do it, but it's cheap as dirt and it works. My third choice would have been to go for a fully fledged storage server with RAID redundancy, UPS, the whole nine yards. The only reason that's not my #1 is because it can get pricey if you go all out. You already seemed to have ruled out using an external HD, but that would have been #4. Then maybe SSDs.
SSDs are targeted at the people who want it for the performance they offer, the power savings, and possibly weight in the case of laptops, cost be damned. Data backup should be all about reliability, storage density, and maximizing your budget, not performance - hell a ton of businesses still use tape backups! Don't expect them to break any speed records any time soon.
PS- Hope the 'pack gets to taste Knight blood today! ACC needs all the bowls they can get.
ArKritz - Monday, December 29, 2008 - link
Derek: If you're looking for foolproof, just keep it simple:- Keep using a regular HDD on the computer.
- Set up backup of specified directories (or whatever) at regular intervals (daily, weekly, whatever) to two external (usb) hdd's.
Just connect, copy, disconnect, repeat with the other drive. Keep one of the drives at relatives/friends.
A bit cumbersome, yes, but I'm sure both of you see the value of spending a bit of time on this.
Oh yes, it's by far the cheapest alternative. ;)
upalachango - Monday, December 29, 2008 - link
The NAS is a cheaper solution as a whole based off pure GBs in addition to functionality. Plus the NAS provides the first tenet of data protection...Redundancy.The SSD is also a great solution, but even a SSD can (and eventually) will fail, it's just far less dramatic of a failure.
The way I see it is like curing a disease versus managing the symptoms. A NAS (actually scheduled backups in general) cures the disease of data-loss with redundancy. The SSD manages the symptom of unreliable copies of data. Good luck and hope the new setup gets your wife back into creating.