Working Drives and Main Backup

Hey guys. I've started working with a new company.
We've got a small group of 5 editors and 1 animator.
No 4k stuff.
Thinking for main backup we could use:
QNAP TS-869-PRO 8-Bay NAS, SATA 6Gbps, USB 3.0
The boss likes g-tech stuff so some G-Technology-G-DRIVE-mobile-Thunderbolt for working drives... yeah thunderbolt because insistent on getting i-macs.
So basically projects are saved internally on the i-mac and at the end of the day backed up to the NAS.
Any suggestions? And what's the flaw in my plans?

Single Thunderbolt drives are fine as work drives if the media is standard HD codecs such as Pro Res or DNxHD. The Qnap network storage are fine archive devices. We normally recommend Thecus because their management software is good and the build quality for the storage unit is solid. However I have also dealt with QNAP and they are solid as well. Qnap is normally more expensive.
Eric
ADK

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Cloning a drive and mirror backup techniques

Hi all,
I have configured my new Mac Pro and loaded new apps and am at a point now where I want to put together a 'backup plan' for backing up work files and a clone drive of my OS/apps drive. I currently have my OS/apps drive (the orig 320GB) in bay #1.
My 'work files' drive is a seagate 500GB in bay #2. I am not familiar with 'mirror backup' technologies but an ideal backup plan for me would be to have a drive in bay #3 that automatically mirrors anything I do on my 'work' drive in bay #2.
Can anyone help me out with suggestions to accomplish this or have a suggestion on a different backup plan? I also would like to have a clone OS/apps drive in bay #4 in case my main OS/apps drive should go down. Again, an ideal situation in this instance would be that any updates or app adds that I make on drive #1 would automatically be mirrored on clone drive #4. Is there a way to accomplish this without having a RAID array and drives? Also, is there a way to make a clone of my up to date OS/apps drive in bay #1 on a drive in bay #4 without having to load all the software and OS again?
Thanks in advance for any input.
I have found this forum invaluable, especially since upgrading to Mac Pro.
As I was contemplating a while back on the upgrade and asked in this forum
for input on moving to the 24" iMac (which is a great machine) vs. the Mac Pro, someone suggested that the iMac may be more cost effective in the short term but the Mac Pro would ultimately be the most cost effective in terms of expandability. I am so glad I went with the Mac Pro.
Best,
Dennis

If you stay on the small side 1 or 2 external FW800 or eSATA drives work rather well. If you start having 5 or 10 1 - 15 TB hard drives then the mentioned sled type external drives are nice. I have really too many external drive cases. I finally purchased a 4 drive Sonnet eSATA, FW800/400 & USB2 interfaces which requires only 1 cable for any of the 4 types of connections & have easy to change hot-swap drive sleds.
Drive makers usually have s Server class hard drive for the best reliability. Seagate's are called their ES2 line of drives. They come in sizes up to 1 TB. Their Barracuda 7200.11 1.5TB Hard Drives still have a 5 year warranty, but are not rated for 24/7 use.
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My son uses SuperDuper for his clones. I use CarbonCopyCloner most of the time, but I also have a copy of SuperDuper. This is what I use to copy my working system to a new drive, then I keep up the old drive as my backup system. All you have to do is keep the files up to date, or reclone them when there is enough changes made. I like to do the updating & then use the system to be sure that it works way of doing things.
the beauty of all of this is that there are enough different ways that you can find 1, 2 or more of them to meet your current or future needs. As someone else said what works for him, may not work for you.

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The iPhone's backup does not include all content available on the iPhone. The backup does not include any iTunes content including 3rd party apps, and it doesn't include any photos transferred from your computer to your iPhone via the iTunes sync process.
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Contacts are designed to be synced with a supported application on your computer. This can be with Outlook 2003 or 2007 along with calendar events, or with the address book used by Outlook Express call Windows Contacts for contact info only.
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I use Time Machine in conjunction with SuperDuper for my backups. I tend to use the simplistic of >the restores in Time Machine for restoring files whereas I like the speed of SuperDuper if a clone is >required. I also like the redundancy of multiple backups by different techniques.
Yes I think its a good strategy. Time machine is great for "undeleteing" if you see what I mean but a clone gets things working again very quickly after a disaster and even if you don't have time to restore you can still boot your computer. I have CCC do an incremental backup every evening at 3am.

IMac won't recognize my external hard drive, and cannot backup onto it.

Time machine fault with Western Digital "my book" external drive
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I have the drop down panel from Time machine preferences which asks me to select "time machine" by clicking on the "use for backup" button.
When I do this message appears,
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Hope there is a simple explanation folks!

Welcome to Discussions compuvic!
I believe you're experiencing a problem that happened with the 10.5.6 update. There is a workaround found by V.K in [this thread|http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=8668572#8668572]. If you follow the instrux it should work.
/p

Bad flash drive and dmg backup

Hi everyone!
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Kent,
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Does anyone know the release date of these two SCSI drives? If you can ballpark it that would help, but please indicate how certain you are.
1. "Apple External Hard Drive", 730MB
Image: http://www.bigkey.com/pic/apple/drives/apple2_gig_external_harddisk.jpg
2. Apple "Tape Backup 40SC"
Image: http://www.borkware.com/rants/stuc-on-you/AppleTapeBackup2.jpg

Re: the Hard Drive.
I have an Apple brochure dated Feb 1989 that offers the Apple hard Drives: 20SC, 40SC, 80SC, and 160SC \[and that's all].
My recollection of the drive you pictured is that it was mildly scandalous because they were not even made by Apple -- they were made by a prominent (in those days) drive reseller with the Apple logo on them.
RE: the tape drive
I bought my first Mac, a Mac II, in late 1987. Apple Unix was soon offered for it, but there was no practical way to issue the software except to buy a Hard Drive 80 with Apple Unix pre-installed. The tape backup unit pictured was available some time later, but was far too expensive to use for issuing software.

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Any thoughts would be welcome. Thank you in advance.

Daniel Norman1 wrote:
My question relates to the back up of the Time Capsule. I have ordered a 1TB LaCie USB drive which I am planning to have permanently connected to the TC for backup purposes. Can I set-up the TC to use Time Machine to "mirror" itself to the USB drive? Is this something that either the MBP or the G5 will have to be set-up to do?
No. Time Machine cannot back-up any network drive, including your Time Capsule's internal HD.
There is an "archive" facility, but it's inconvenient, to say the least. See #Q6 in the Using TIME MACHINE with a TIME CAPSULE *User Tip,* also at the top of this forum.

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I am having the same problem with Western Digital MyBook (1TB). But only if Time Machine is active. The drive will unmount randomly.

Tried to fix spotlight indexing and lost my entire drive and backup; can you help me find them?

Hi,
I am in a complete crisis. If anyone can help me, I'd be very grateful.
I tried to correct my Spotlight indexing by using a combination of the sudo mdutil -E / , sudo mdutil -i on / , and sudo rm -rf /.Spotlight-V100 commands from the terminal.
I am not sure what happened, but the computer went into an interminable color-wheel and, when I shut down and rebooted after an hour or two, I found that both my main drive and my backup drive had severe problems.
DiskUtility volunteered to correct these. I ran it on my main drive and found that my entire directory appears to have been erased.
Disk Warrior cannot repair. Nor can TechTool. Both declare that the directory structure is now beyond repair (which they also say of my former backup clone).
My main drive now has barely nine files left - and a handful of empty folders:
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/Library/Application Support/
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/Library/Application Support/CrashReporter/
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/Library/Keychains/System.keychain
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/Library/Preferences/com.apple.TimeMachine.plist
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/Users/ericcolvin/Library/Frameworks/
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/Users/ericcolvin/Library/Preferences/com.apple.Terminal.plist
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/Users/ericcolvin/Library/Preferences/com.bittorrent.uTorrent.plist
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/Users/ericcolvin/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/Users/ericcolvin/Library/Autosave Information/
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches/Startup/
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches/Directories/System/
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches/Directories/System/Library/Exten sions/KextPropertyValues_OSBundleHelper_i386.plist.gz
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches/Directories/System/Library/Exten sions/KextIdentifiers.plist.gz
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/System/Library/Caches/com.apple.kext.caches/Directories/System/Library/Exten sions/IOKitPersonalities_i386.ioplist.gz
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/System/Library/Caches/com.apple.bootstamps/0E6271FF-3F33-3661-9B4A-38AFF32D4 860/
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/Applications/
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/net/
file:///Volumes/Eric's HD/home/
Though I did not run any file repairs on the back up drive, it has also lost all of its files (it shows just one remaining
file:///Volumes/Eric's Backup/System/Library/CoreServices/boot.efi - whatever that is).
FileSalvage is now beavering away, attempting to scavenge some 350Gb of applications, e-mails, photos, iTunes, and movies (most of which it is unable to name). But these will all be unlabelled and randomly organised by extension type. These could take months to sift through and the list is almost certain to be incomplete. I have no other backups of my system apart from a two year old clone.
Please tell me. Is there anything I can do to get back my lost directory structure?
                       Might there be some use of an Undelete routine that might recover the directory alone and thus allow me to salvage either disk?
                        I don't even know what sort of extension to hunt for in order to attempt such a restore
                       - nor how I might drop it back into its correct spot on the volume.
All suggestions gratefully received.

Thanks, guys.
Yes, FileSalvage seems able to retrieve a vast jumble of unnamed "junk files," a tiny percentage of which are probably highly valuable to me. The problem will be finding them amongst the jumble. It could take weeks. ITunes files and MP3s are more promising, as it seems to have been able to reconstruct the files' names - and even cover art - from their metadata.
No. TechTool Pro wrote nothing at all. Sadly, though, I had allowed Disk Utility to reduce the number of threads or leaves or something in the volume directory, before I realised the gravity of the situation. It has thus made a very small alteration to my main drive (resulting, no doubt in the creation of those 9 system files and their containing folders). But the back-up drive had nothing further written to it since the apparent deletion of the volume.
I downloaded a freeware program called TestDisk which claims to analyse drive partitions. The partitions on each of my two physical drives (the internal and the backup clone) were not apparently affected - just the total loss of the volume directory structure on the boot partition in each case. So, would this be the wrong tool for the job? http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk It does claim to be able to "Rebuild NTFS boot sector." I don't really know what that means. Can anyone tell me whether a rebuilt boot sector will enable me to recover a deleted volume directory structure?
Meanwhile, I am also running a trial version of Stellar Phoenix, which claims to reinstate "lost/deleted volumes." It claims to have "found 6 lost/deleted volumes" already - after five hours, during which it has scanned about 5% of my 1.5 T external drive. So I suppose it may well take days to finish scanning. Then, I expect it may ask me to buy a serial code in order to proceed.
Does anyone have experience with Phoenix, or understand the jargon about lost/deleted volumes? Once I've bought the full version, is there a good chance it will actually reconstruct the whole volume as it once was - or is it more likely just to scavenge scores of thousands of nameless file snippets as per FileSalvage?
I don't have a problem with paying the boffins at Stellar if they are actually able to save me months of sifting through random unnamed files in order to locate the ones I've lost.

Files missing from drive - and Time Machine (Freeway files)

A file that was just updated yesterday is now gone from the computer - everywhere. Gone from the internal drive and gone from time machine. When I do a search for the file type, the last update to it shows as December 19th. This is the day after I erase & installed Snow Leopard and brought the file back onto the machine from a backup drive. When I click "yesterday" in the sidebar, or "past week" it shows the application (Freeway) being used, but not the file.
Freeway is a little buggy with where it saves things, but all the resources for the file are still in the expected location. The .freeway itself, its backup on the internal hard drive, and its backup on Time Machine are all gone when I search in finder. This computer has been acting a little wonky, which is why I did the erase & install. Just last week a partition of the startup drive failed to mount. I turned off the computer, unplugged it for 30 seconds, and it was fine.
Is this a symptom of impending startup drive failure? Already repaired permissions and ran a repair disk on the drive where the files should have been.

It sounds like the files were deleted during the day yesterday.
If they were on your system when today's first Time Machine backup was done (ie, after midnight), they'll be on that backup. So if you haven't yet, look directly at today's first backup, via the "Star Wars" display. You may or may not have success searching the backup there, so be sure to check all the places you might have put them.
A very long shot is disk corruption, that somehow lost/overwrote the files. Verify your internal hd to be sure it's ok.

How to? Working images on main computer drive and backup to externals?

Hi there---
Right now I work in Bridge CS3 and Photoshop and have a workflow and image management system that works for me. But I want to see if I can integrate Lightroom, which I just installed.
I skimmed Martin Evening's book and I am still not sure I can do the following:
Can I keep 3-6 months worth of images on my working computer drive, backing up regularly as I always do, and then erase them on my working computer drive while keeping them on my two backup drives? Or does the Lightroom database not allow you to work that way. My read of Evening is that he works entirely off the external disks. But I don't want to do that. My external disks are just for backups only and I want to keep it that way.
When I would need something from 3-6 months ago, then I'd want to be able to fire up the backup drives and retrieve.
Any suggestions on whether I can do this and how I would do this would be great!
Thanks, Paul

Thanks! Is there a "how to" posted somewhere about this?? I need workflow suggestions and I'm coming up blank.
Currently, I put a new yyyy-mm-dd-nameofshoot folder for every shoot which contains a folder with the original RAW files. I delete the bad ones in bridge. And develop the ones I want to level 10 jpgs in photoshop. I put those in a JPG folder. Sometimes I put other things in the same folder that I want to keep in there... like client invoices, retouched photos, uprezzed images, web galleries. I try to keep everything together under 1 folder and manage everything through my Mac OS interface... not through software.
My backup routine consists of backing up weekly to two external drives using Prosoft's Data Backup 3. I do a simple copy, not a sync or clone, which only copies new or modified files. If the files get deleted off my computer disk, they get kept on the backup. In this way, I clean my computer disk periodically and retain my backup.
I'm so happy with my backup system and kind of want to retain it, but also use LR. I'm worried that the database will screw up my system of working. But I'm attracted to the easy metadata entry and image search capabilities.
Any ideas would be appreciated!
paul

Time Machine backup and main drive corrupted. Help! (REWARD OFFERED)

Here's the deal:
I have a Macbook Pro and a Mac Mini both runnign Snow Leopard. I use the Mac Mini as a kind of media center / server, it has a few external drives connected to it. On of these drives (1GB) is dedicated to Time Machine, the Mac Mini (80 GB hard drive) backs up to it directly and the Macbook Pro (500 GB hard drive) does it over the network (Time Machine created a sparsebundle). This has worked well for years now. Occasionally I got the error that Time Machine needed to start a new backup because the old one was corrupt. That happened about 2-3 times a year (did the same thing when I backued up via USB). Now about 2 weeks ago, that error came up and I just let the Macbook Pro on overnight and connected the ethernet cable for faster transfer.
When I woke up, the Macbook Pro didn't respont at all, spinning beachball, no response at all beside mouse movement. I let it do it's thing for another 10 hours (while I was at work) and just held down the power button to power off and restart it. But all I got was the gray-on-gray flashing folder with the question mark in it, that's what you get when the Mac can't find bootable partitions. So I popped in the OSX Snow Leopard install disk, ran disk utility. It saw the hard drive, but no partition (i.e. Machintosh HD) on it. I checked the Time Machine backup and the sparsebundle was 300 GB (the Macbook Pro had 400 GB used, the remaining 100 GB were free). There is no way to restore from an unfinished Time Machine backup...
First thing I did was clone the internal (Macbook Pro) hard drive to a DMG disk image using DiskDrill (the only program I found that could recognize the drive at all, not even DiskWarrior could). I also bought the exact same hard drive model and partitioned it like the cloned the corrupted hard drive to the new one using ddrescue (a command line tool that doesn't quit upon i/o errors but proceeds and tries to recover as much as it can). It copied everything except 65 kilobytes, the corrupted drive seemed to be physically damaged in a bunch of sectors relatively at the beginning of the disk. Since I had now an exact copy on a fresh, healthy drive, I went crazy trying out Disk Warrior (didn't recognize the drive at all), data rescue, testdisc, p a Windows isk, etc. Only R-Studio (on windows) showed the EFI and Macintosh HD partitions on there, they started and ended on the same sectors on the corrupted drive and its clone. After some research, I figured that the partition table was corrupt so I reformated the clone disk using the OSX Snow Leopard install disk (1 HFS Journaled Partition with GUID Partition table). R-Studio showed the EFI and Macintosh HD on that reformated drive, again, same sectors as before. So I figured I could just copy just the bytes where the Macintosh HD starts from the corrupted drive to the clone (using ddrescue). That worked, after almost 24 hours, I had the clone drive with a "disk1" partition on it that even disk utility could see.
Now I was able to run Disk Warrior on it, but all it could do was recover a few Application folders (Resource-Folders and lproj-stuff), about 100 MB in total. It couldn't repair more of catalog file apparently. Luckily, Time Machine backed up quite a bit (300 GB out of 400 GB of data) and I was able to manually copy all the Dokuments, Desktop, user Library, Applications, Music, Download and Movies. Unfortunatley, only a little bit of the Pictures folder was copied. iPhoto library (80 to 100 GB) was nowhere to be found, backup must have failed right then. I can salvage the drives (time machine drive, original hard drive with a few broken sectors, DMG-image of that drive, 1-1 copy of that drive with partition table repaired) but that only gives me files with numeric names and today's date on teh JPEGs (instead of the date the picture was taken).
Is there any way I can recover that iPhoto library? It appears the catalog file got corrupted because the hard drive (only 8 months old...) failed on a few sectors. If I understand it correctly, the catalog file on HFS+ file systems is where the folder structure and file names are stored in a B-Tree. I can't imagine that some i/o error during backup can totally annihilate that file when it was working perfectly before. Here's a few things I want to try out but haven't figured out how so far:
- Time Machine had to start a new backup. There's plenty of free space on that drive so there's a good chance there's old data left on it. Is there a way to restore files (including file names) and fodlers from deleted time machine backups?
- Is there any way to re-build that catalog file from what is there left on the original hard drive? I can't imagine 65 kilobytes destroys it all.
- Are there other ways to recover my iPhoto Library? The raw JPEG (and AVI) files with correct file names or metadata would suffice.
Thanks in advance for any help, I'll actually reward the person with a working solution, 5 years of photo memories are somewhat important. It really ***** that a failure during a backup destroys that...

Final Update:
The catalog file on the original hard drive could not be fixed. Seems like Mac OSX tried to repair the catalog file while the sectors this file resides on failed. To make things worse the partition table was also broken beyond repair, even overwriting the sectors with a new correct partition table didn't help. DiskWarrior found less then 100 MB worth of stuff, mainly Applications folders.
I recovered pretty much everything from the incomplete Time Machine backup by right-clicking the sparsebundle and browsing through the folders with the long alphanumeric names, looking for the version of the folder with the most files in there. All I was missing was part of the ~/Pictures folder, i.e. photobooth pictures and the whole iPhoto Library. My best option was to recover these files using data recovery tools.
DiskDrill proved to be the absolute best, fast, responsive, efficient, and the only one able to mount the DMG-file with no valid file system on it. As there were many i/o errors and broken sectors on the original hard drive, I made a copy of it using a free command line tool called ddrescue (the standard dd tool just aborted when it encountered the i/o error). ddrescue copied the whole drive to a DMG image, I had 56 kilobytes with errors on the first pass, but it managed to shrink that down to just 4 kilobytes (wow!) after the second pass where it tries to re-read the broken secors. It took about 24 hours for a 512 GB 2.5" drive (5400 rpm) but well worth it. Be advised that ddrescue is really persistent and tries everything to recover those last errorneous bytes. At the very end of the process, the read/write head of the hard drive just goes wild trying to catch the data on the sectors with different momentum. This works but I assume this is pretty damaging for the original drive. I also copied it all to a new hard drive (again using ddrescue) and tried partition and catalog repair tools on that (DiskWarrion, testdiks, pdisk, etc.). Still no hint of a good result.
I made a deep scan on the clone hard drive with DiskDrill. At the end (after about 8 hours over USB) it found 13 partition (I assume that's the Macintosh HD, EFI and some DMG files lying around) and hundreds of thousands of pictures. I restored some JPG files just to check the quality, some were damaged, some were good with all the EXIF data intact. I just made it copy all JPG files into a folder. I know the pictures taken from my camera produce JPGs larger than 1 MB and smaller than 5 MB, so I sorted them by size and moved the smaller and larger files into seperate folders. I took the remaining folder (100 GB) and just dragged it into iPhoto. It imported them overnight. Auto-Split by events and I got my library back, alas with different file names, originals and edited versions side by side, lots of duplicates, some damaged, some not. But hey, all the pictures in chronological order. Okay there was also one large event with all the JPGs without valid EXIF data landed inside, iPhoto just takes the file creation date (i.e. the date where the recovered file was copied). As far as I can tell, these are all just data corpses, halfway overwritten copies, random pictures from the internet, desktop pictures, etc.
I started to work my way back through the events, deleting the duplicates and renaming the events. There's an app called "Duplicate Annihilator" which apparently can find duplicate pictures in iPhoto and mark them for you. The free version only does 500 pictures but if it works, I'll get the full version. It can mark th eduplicate photos by adding something to the picture comment in iPhoto so you can manually review it all. Good stuff!

I have about 130 gigs of movies on my iTunes and was wondering if I can just put them on my backup hard drive and remove them from my main computer to free up the space

I have about 130 gigs of movies on my iTunes and was wondering if I can just put them on my backup hard drive and remove them from my main computer to free up the space.

I haven't done this with an external drive, but I would imagine it works the same way as if you have multiple internal drives. Also hopefully it works with less headache in OSX than in windows.
Anyway, move all your music over to your external, and then go into itunes -> preferences -> advanced -> iTunes media folder location. Navigate to your drive, and pick the folder you want. Ensure that your folders are set up like they are in your ~/Music/iTunes folder, or wherever your iTunes is currently pointing. Then quit and restart itunes. If your music doesn't show up, try dragging your music folder from your external onto itunes, and it will hopefully update your library.xml.
As far as Jerry's problem goes, you could try adding another music folder to your library.xml, but I really have no idea whether this will work or not. If you want to give it a try (can't promise you won't corrupt your library.xml, so make a copy beforehand) you can find the music folder xml element right near the top of the xml file (open it with textedit/textmate/whatever text editor you want (NOT WORD)). Curious to know if this works, and if it doesn't I have other ideas so let me know.

Working Drives and Main Backup

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