Best tool for cloning drive and regular back-ups

A 500gb 7200.4 seagate drive just arrived, and I'm intending on cloning the 500gb 5400rpm stock drive in my 15" 2.8ghz unibody MBP to the 7200.4 (attached in a 2.5 SATA USB enclosure), and then using the 7200.4 as the main drive, once I've found time time to install it internally. Once I've done that, the 5400rpm stock drive will be used for regular back-ups via completely cloning the upgraded internal disk.
I have CCC installed, but I've rarely used it, and I've noticed that the OS X disk services appears to have a 'create image' option. And then there's Time Machine, which I know very little about. The most important thing is that I need a bootable disk which, in theory, could simply be installed in a new machine and I'll be right where I left off. Which is the best back-up tool for this?

Hi Neil,
I have CCC installed, but I've rarely used it, and I've noticed that the OS X disk services appears to have a 'create image' option. And then there's Time Machine, which I know very little about. The most important thing is that I need a bootable disk which, in theory, could simply be installed in a new machine and I'll be right where I left off. Which is the best back-up tool for this?
CCC is a very good tool for what you gave in mind. SuperDuper http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html is another one in the same league.
Time Machine is a good backup tool, since it backups once the complete content of your OSX harddisk and further on only the changed files.
It can also be used the restore the OSX but for this you have to boot from the OSX DVD.
To me using CCC or SuperDuper would be exactly what you are looking for:
Making a bootable clone onto your external HD, from which you can either boot-up your Mac or simply reinstall the external HD in your Mac.
Regards
Stefan

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Best setup for external drives and backup

I'm using Aperture to organize several thousand photos. I've gotten good advice her before about how to get started on this. I'm not a professional and I'm not an experienced user of Aperture, so don't assume a lot of knowledge when you answer. I'm wondering what the best way to set up the file storage would be. I use a MacBook Pro, so obviously that's out for storage, and financially, purchasing a more powerful desktop is out for the time being. I was thinking of purchasing a mirror drive system, like this: http://www.newertech.com/products/gmax.php
But then, there still remains the problem of backing up the photos in case of a fire or theft, etc. I have many of them on DVD, but not with all the metadata that I've added. Can I back the external drives up to a cloud-based storage system through the wireless on the MacBook?
Or, is the answer none of the above? What recommendations do you folks have for managing this?

more:
Paula-
Mirror drives are very much less than ideal for images backup. Mirroring occurs in real-time, so errors, breaks, etc. simply get copied. With images work (unlike fanancial work, for instance) we do not need real-time backup we just need regular accurate backup. Just have 2-3 external drives and rotate them regularly, always having one drive off-site (could be in your car or whatever). Back up manually rather than automatically so that you can be reasonably certain that the backup is not backing up something that just broke.
I suggest the below workflow. Note that most important is that original images from the camera card are copied to two locations before reformatting the card and before importing into Aperture or any other images management application.
Original images never change, so I prefer to manually copy them to two locations asap after capture: one location is the computer drive and the other is an external backup HD that itself gets backed up off site regularly. That assures me that "the pic is in the can." Until two digital files exist on different media I do not consider the pic in the can.
Then reformat the card in-camera, not before.
The Masters then get imported into Aperture from the Mac internal drive by reference (i.e. "Storing Files: in their current location" on the Mac internal drive). After editing is complete (may take weeks or months), from within Aperture I relocate the referenced Masters to an external hard drive for long-term storage.
I do use Time Machine routinely on the MBP, but for the daily-volatile activities going of the MBP. I prefer not to have TM be my backup-of-originals protocol. Instead TM backs up the Mac internal drive on the TM schedule and I back up original images asap based on my shooting schedule. Also the TM drive is a different drive than the drives used for long-term original image files archiving.
TM does back up my Library because the Library lives on the Mac internal drive but I do not assume that TM works for Library backup. I back the Library up to Vaults (on the same drives I put archives of Masters on) independent of TM. IMO one should back up image files and back up Vaults manually after verifying that what is being backed up is not broken, because automatic backup will just back up a broken Library or whatever.
Note that Masters need only be backed up once (but to multiple backup locations) and that backup should happen immediately after copying to the hard drive from the camera card, before involving Aperture or any other images management app.
Sorry for the redundant verbosity above but some was copied from previous posts. Also, I reinforce what Léonie said about DVDs. DVDs are way too slow, unreliable, etc. Instead rotate multiple hard drives to achieve redundancy.
HTH
-Allen

Best tool for Inverse Telecining and deinterlacing ?

I have very limited experience in encoding videos before.
Recently I'm trying to transcode a DVD into H.264 with x264. All the VOB files are dumped already.
As for the video part, I've decided to do it this way :
mkfifo TEMP.y4m
x264 OPTIONS -o OUTPUT.mkv TEMP.y4m & mplayer -vo yuv4mpeg:file=TEMP.y4m OPTIONS INPUT.VOB
I believe this method to be clean and efficient.
The problem is: This VOB file is in NTSC format, and I'm pretty convinced that it's telecined, after reading this:
http://www.doom9.org/ivtc-tut.htm wrote:TELECINE is a process where the FILM first is slowed down to 23.976 frames/second. Then for every 4 frames, an extra frame is created from fields of adjacent frames. If a frame consists of two fields, top (t) and bottom (b) and the original sequence is 1t1b 2t2b 3t3b 4t4b, then the telecined sequence would be 1t1b 2t2b 2t3b 3t4b 4t4b (commonly called 2:3 pull down because of the alternating 2 field, 3 field progression). This also means that the frame rate increases to 29.97 frames/second.
I viewed the video frame by frame, and found out that there're 2 sequential interlaced frames out of every 5 in a non-static scene. These are 2t3b 3t4b frames I think.
mplayer comes with some video filters that might help: With "-vf pp=" the result isn't that satisfying, but "-vf pullup" do the job nicely, that is, I can almost see no interlacing at all with this command:
mplayer -vf pullup VTS_01_1.VOB -noconfig all
On the other hand, I also noticed that there're 2 sequential repeated frames out of every 5 in a non-static scene. The frame-rate is 29.970 fps. This is bad because repeating means inefficiency in terms of compression. The better result is using only one of these 2 repeated frames at a frame-rate of 23.976 fps, which means dropping 20% extra frames.
But I don't know how to achieve this.
I want to achieve this at the mplayer decoding stage, so that x264 is fed with a yuv4mpeg source stream with no interlacing or extra frames.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
I'm not familiar with mencoder's options, though it seems to be able to drop the extra frame with "-vf pullup,softskip -ofs 24000/1001", but I can't find a way to let mencoder output as yuv4mpeg. Also there is a reason why I tend to avoid using mencoder:
mencoder -ss 209 -endpos 20 -ovc copy -oac copy -o _short_.vob VTS_01_1.VOB
This is supposed to cut a 20-second short clip from the VOB using copy. But even task as this simple could be wrong...which is really disappoiting. Look at these 2 screen shots.
By using mencoder -ovc copy::
http://omploader.org/vMjE3Zw
The original (mplayer VTS_01_1.VOB)::
http://omploader.org/vMjE3aA
Maybe it's just my build of mencoder(compiled at home)... But with this I really can't say mencoder is to be trusted.
...Or, is it something wrong in my command?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
By the way, for this specific DVD, I believe mplayer plus x264 together can achieve the best result; on the other hand, just as the title suggests, I'd like to find some decent tool to do IVTC and Deinterlacing. CLI preferred but good GUI apps are also welcome
Thanks in advance!
Last edited by lolilolicon (2009-07-25 03:31:59)

skottish wrote:You should be able to use the -vf pullup,softskip stuff still.
man mplayer wrote:Softskip
Only useful with MEncoder. Softskip moves the frame skipping (dropping) step of encoding from before the filter chain to some point during the filter chain. This allows filters which need to see all frames (inverse telecine, temporal denoising, etc.)
Actually, when I tried::
mplayer -vf pullup,softskip VTS_01_1.VOB -noconfig all
The result is the same as just using "-vf pullup". The extra frame can't be dropped by mplayer this way......
Too bad many "convenient" tools like h264enc all use mencoder. I don't know whether handbrake does too. Haven't tried it out.
Avisynth is a great tool but works only for windows. x264's built in deinterlaced mode does no good in my case. ffmpeg's filters are still too limited by far. What can I do? Is there anything that does nothing but good IVTC?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Klepper wrote:It says to always use the softskip filter together with pullup
man mplayer wrote:Always follow pullup with the softskip filter when encoding to ensure that pullup is able to see each frame.
In my case, pullup seems to work better than filmdint: I've just tried the h264enc script which is almost totally a frontend to mencoder. Look at the mencoder filters it used:
mencoder VTS_01_1.VOB -o 01.avi -fps 30000/1001 -ofps 24000/1001 -vf filmdint=fast=0/io=30:24/dint_thres=256,softskip,harddup -oac pcm -ovc x264 -x264encopts <x264OPTIONS>
See, it also used filmdint as you suggust. The result is not too bad: removed the extra frame and plays at 24fps. But I can still notice interlacing occasionally. Maybe it's because the video isn't constant pattern "PPPII" but with some shifting (say, PPPIIPPPII...PPPIIPIIPPPIIPPPII, I found some pattern like this in the source VOB)
Man page says "io=<ifps>:<ofps>" must match "-fps/-ofps" ("-fps 30000/1001" and "-ofps 24000/1001" in my case.)
Since -ofps is an option ONLY for mencoder, but not for mplayer, filmdint can't make mplayer drop the extra frame like mencoder.
I played the VOB with "mplayer -vf filmdint=fast=0/io=30:24 VTS_01_1.VOB -noconfig all" and there're lots of "@@@@@@@@ Bottom-first field??? @@@@@@@@" spitted out in the console. I read about this in the man page but don't understand....
If the source is MPEG-2, [u]this must be the first filter to allow access to the field-flags set by the MPEG-2 decoder[/u]. Depending on the source MPEG, you may be fine ignoring this advice, as long as you do not see lots of "Bottom-first field" warnings.
I don't have any other filters in the command line, so... why?
The occasional interlacing is the same as the video encoded with h264enc. Also, it did not drop the extra frame anyway.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Also I have a doubt:
In my first post, I wrote:
The original (mplayer VTS_01_1.VOB)::
http://omploader.org/vMjE3aA
But I think even this is not "original" -- not as good as the original video before it was telecined into NTSC format. I think it's mplayer not doing it good enough. The real original frame should have no blocking......
I've compared it to one fansub rip, the same frame looks better than in the image above, very little blocking, also the bass string isn't blurred like in the image above:
http://omploader.org/vMjE5aw
I don't know how they did it. And I actually want to do it better
Last edited by lolilolicon (2009-07-25 09:32:30)

On my ipad recently I have a iCloud Backup alert telling me that my ipad hasn;t been backed up for 2 weeks and how back-ups happen etc..I tap OK button and nothing happens. This alert will not disappear or let me use the ipad? Any ideas??

On my ipad I have an iCloud Back-up alert that will not disppear, I am unable to use the ipad as I press OK and it won't do anything, any ideas???

Here is a similar thread:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4408608?start=0&tstart=0
Try turning off the iPad, or pressing the home button.

HT3275 Verbatim drive I use for Time Machine backups got messed-up. I erased it. It does now perform its regular back-ups. HOWEVER, I can't "Enter TM."

I am running OS 10.6.8. The external Verbatim drive I use for Time Machine backups got messed-up, so I erased it & chose it as my back-up disc for TM. It does perform its regular back-ups. HOWEVER, when I try to "Enter TM" nothing happens?

I read some hints about this issue from similar queries, including "Restart your computer". That did the trick!

What is the best tools for analyzer VoIP

I need ur help, i looking the tool helps analyzer VoIP in WAN/TDM. What is the best tool for Cisco System or wich recommends.
Thxs!

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Thanks for contacting National Instruments support. Each set of the vis you mention are the latest, and some use similar methods to do the FFT than the other. The SMT is usually the best in most applications. There is also another option in the case of scope, you can fetch FFT data from the driver. The FFT is not actually implemented in hardware, but in the driver, and this is transparent to the user. It's simpler to use, but not as efficient as the SMT.
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I am using Lightroom 5 and am hapy about it, but recently I hav encountered a problem when trying to edit an image in another program, i.e. Elements. I used the clone tool, saved the result and went back to Lightroom to open the image there. I did find a

I am using Lightroom 5 and am hapy about it, but recently I hav encountered a problem when trying to edit an image in another program, i.e. Elements. I used the clone tool, saved the result and went back to Lightroom to open the image there. I did find a second copy, but this is identic with the one I already had in Lightroom, and I can see noe result of the clone process.

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Question: Best method for mounting drives at log-in time?

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Hi Bigsky,
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Suggestions about the best tool for quality check for an ADF application

Hi All,
I need a few suggestions about the best tool for quality check in our ADF applicaiton.
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The Best Tool For Multiple Animated Objects

Hi,
I am expirimenting with Flash Web Sites, and I would like suggestions as to a starting point for my project, and I am assuming a Flash website is where I would start.
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Best.

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For you interactivity (rollOvers / triggering more animations with mouse) you will need some actionscript but don't get hung up on that now.
There is a world of info out there. Google "animation basics in flash) you may have to weed through some garbage but you will find what you are looking for somewhere.

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Up until a few weeks ago I would certainly reccomend Skype, but my advice is for youy to look for another company.
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I've only had my iphone 5s for a week. I keep getting an error message of "Server has stopped responding." I need the server to work. Does anyone know if there is a "fix" for the problem? Other wise, I probably best return for a refund and get a Samsung.

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sandyzotz wrote:
Other wise, I probably best return for a refund and get a Samsung.
Unlikely. Based on the complete lack of detail of the issue provided it is entirely possible the same issue would occur.
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Best tool for cloning drive and regular back-ups

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