Backups

[rock15478]

Hi guys,

I currently run both Pro Tools LE 7.3 and Logic Pro 8 with a 002R interface in my studio. I have a Power Mac G5 with 2 internal hard drives. The main drive is 250 GB, which includes all the system files and applications. The second drive is 200 GB and is for all audio files.

So far, I have only done back ups to DVD on a per session basis. However, I would like to start backing up both drives to an external hard drive. I'm looking at buying a firewire 800 1 TB drive, for backups specifically. Now, I'm running Tiger 10.4, as I'm not ready to upgrade to Leopard yet. I do have a copy of Leopard but I don't want to risk compatibility issues at the moment (too many software and plugins that could potentially mess things up).

So..my questions are as follows. First, what backup software would be best to automatically back up both of these internal drives? I can't use Time Machine as I'm running Tiger. Basically, I don't want to ever lose any data if a hard drive ever fails on me. Is there a way to back up both of these drives to the same external hard drive? (Both drives total to 450 GB combined...and the drive I'm looking at buying is 1TB) Is Super Duper a good backup method?

Also, what kind of firewire 800 1TB drives would you recommend? How important is getting firewire 800 above 400? Thanks for all the help.

[Jussi]

SuperDuper is indeed one of the most pleasant applications I have ever used. The first back up will take its time, the next ones five to ten minutes using Smart Update.

With SD you can back up both drives to the same external hard drive with two partitions.

[rock15478]

Thanks...Anyone else? What do you guys use for backing up?

[Slim Shady]

I keep a separate drive for my OS backup drive, basically making a full clone using Carbon Copy Cloner once every few months (overwriting the old one), and definitely do the same before doing any upgrades/installs.

I have other drives for session/project backups, which I do just via drag-n-drop from my dedicated internal to the backup drive in the Finder. I like the cheapo LaCie USB2.0 drives for that stuff - it's a little slower than firewire, but for $/GB they're hard to beat. I also do burn backup DVDs of projects as well (redundancy is good) but generally go to the Hard Drives if I need to restore something.

[Roey]

The Maxtor One Touch 4 ships with a backup application that lets you select source folders for backup. It is then pretty much a matter of pressing a button on the drive to start the backup procedure.

It does a simple copy backup (no zip or catalog, which I prefer), and keeps 10 previous version for files that have changed since the last backup.

Very simple and useful.