Journal

Backup solutions?

  • Posted on: February 14, 2005
  • In: Personal
  • Comments closed

Yesterday evening, whilst getting to grips with a particularly tricky bit of design, Photoshop crashed. Wierd, photoshop hardly ever crashes on me. The dark days of OS 9 rose up within me like the morning after a really good night. It suddenly dawned on me I didn’t save my work for the last hour. Then it dawned on me again (there was a lot of dawning last night), I don’t have a reliable backup solution.

Since last night i’ve been giving this a bit of thought and quite a bit of research. I have the following kit at home.

  • A G5 iMac
  • A Compaq laptop
  • My iPod
  • My wife’s iPod Mini
  • Airport Express
  • A Netgear wireless router
  • Airpot expreme
  • A USB scanner and printer

Neither the mac or the PC is backed up and now as my wife and I are a two iPod family, and the fact we mainly use Airport Express to play music directly from iTunes (can’t remember the last time I played a CD), we have a lot of music on these computers.

Ideally, i’d like the PC and MAc backed up to a network hard drive and also have all our media stored on this drive as well - photos, video and music. The clincher would be to have our iTunes libraries remote on this drive and accessible over the network when we launch iTunes, that way we keep all media in a central location.

Backup solutions?

So, i’ve been looking around for a suitable solution to the hardware issue and i’ve found a solution. The Lacie Ethernet Mini is a drive with an ethernet and USB port, which is then accessed over a local network and administered via http. It comes in 250, 400 and 500 Gb models. Maxtor and Iomega have similar solutions but I can’t find anywahere in the UK where they are as competitive as the Lacie.

So, i’ve got my hardware. I’ve got all my media on it. This is where I need your advice. I need to backup the media on the drive (partitioning might be an answer here). I also need to backup the work folder on a 60Gb PC and an 80Gb iMac and have remote iTunes libraries. Here’s the questions:

  • What backup software would you recommend?
  • Is it possible to have external iTunes libraries sharing the same music files?
  • Would I be able to use the external hard drive’s USB port to share my printer and scanner via a usb hub?

I’m amazed it’s taken this long for the industry to release a cheap networkable drive like this. But what I also find amazing is the lack of robust, cheap backup software. Let me know your thoughts, I could do with your help!

Comments

RsyncX is a free OS X GUI that sits on top of the excellent Unix rsync utility. Be sure to try resizing the “Simple” windowto reveal additional backup sources, a feature that has no explicit affordance, making it easy to miss. This is helpful: http://www.labf.org/~egon/mac_backup/

As long as you have iTunes set up to not copy tracks to the iTunes music folder when you add them (in the advanced prefs), you should be able to reference remote files across a network. Just drag ‘n drop from the Finder.

Not sure about the printer thing. Maybe just give it a try?

One other thought on backups: off-site backups should be part of the equation. If you get burgled (or if there’s a fire), they’re going to get your backup drives too.

Dan Phiffer's Gravatar

Dan Phiffer
Tue 15th Feb 2005
at 1:09 am

I use a solution that takes RAID and offsite backup to a neat and an inexpensive conclusion, check out rebyte.com

Kenn's Gravatar

Kenn
Wed 16th Feb 2005
at 2:15 am

Dan - thanks for that. RsyncX looks really interesting and it nicely provides an easy to use interface over Unix (which i’m really not familiar with) - i’ll give it a go when I get the drive in a couple of weeks.

Kenn - I’ve had a look at the site and it looks like an interesting alternative - i’ll certainly bear it in mind.

Mark Boulton's Gravatar

Mark Boulton
Wed 16th Feb 2005
at 10:11 am

For windows the easiest and cheapest way of doing this is with windows built in native backup software (start -> run -> ntbackup in windows 2000/XP) if you have windows XP its also somewhere in the accessories folder in the programs menu. It is especially nice that if your main computer dies any newer windows based computer can read your backup files. This software does incrementals so you could do a full backup weekly and incremental during the week or something like that.

I second the recommendation for rsync X on the Mac. Rsync has been a unix standard for a long time and it is also useful for keeping two backup hard drives in sync, one on-site and one off-site. You can rsync your iMac to the shared network drive as a regular backup, and then rsync the shared network drive (which contains the iMac’s files and your windows backupfile.bkf files) with your off-site backup drive, once every 2 weeks or so.

I can say this from experience, it is always cheaper to pay for and setup reliable backups than not to.

Matthew Geddert's Gravatar

Matthew Geddert
Fri 13th May 2005
at 8:09 pm

Funny, I just got one of these little devices myself as a backup solution. I’m planning on doing a weekly backup to it and as suggested might start backing up closed jobs to DVD also and moving them off site.

Nathan Pitman's Gravatar

Nathan Pitman
Tue 3rd Jan 2006
at 2:30 pm

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A picture of Mark BoultonI'm a graphic designer from near Cardiff in the UK. I've been a designer for over ten years now and primarily work on the web. I'm still partial to a bit of print every now and then though. I used to work for Agency.com in London as an Art Director before working as a Senior Designer for the BBC in sunny Cardiff. This was all before I took leave of my senses and formed my own design consultancy, Mark Boulton Design Ltd.

I've got a thing about grids and typography and occasionally ramble on about them to anyone who will listen.

If you're after simple, clean and effective web design; let me know.