Ideal Storage Setup.

[mattyeates]

I'm just now setting up my 003, but first I need to back up and wipe clean my Macbook's internal drive as it's nearly full. I have a Glyph GT050Q 1TB and a Seagate FreeAgent Desk 1 TB (which I plan on sending back unless I need it per the information I receive from responses to this post).

Can I back up all my personal files (music, photos, documents) to the Glyph and safely use it as the drive to which I track music? Should I partition the drive, say, 100 GB for all my personal stuff and then the remaining 830 GB or so will all be for tracking and back-up purposes?

Or should I back everything personal onto one drive and also use that for session back-ups and then use the Glyph solely for tracking purposes?

Thanks for all feedback. I'm simply trying to optimize my setup.

-Matt

 

[stefangs]

you will probably get as many opinions as you ask people... here are my 2 cents:

if you can afford it at all, use a dedicated drive for your tracking. if not, partition your extra drive. the reason for not sharing the external audio drive with other data is that other files are typically much smaller than audio files. when you start copying this and that, then delete stuff here and there, the drive becomes quite fragmented over time. having said that, i heard about current operating systems taking care of defragmentation without you knowing, so the above may not apply to you. but there is a general agreement to not use the system drive.

 

[witzendoz]

Because time is money to me and it takes time to burn DVDs with back up files, I now just buy an external USB drive and back up everything to that, when its full I put it away in my storage cupboard and buy another as the price for a new drive is cheaper than my time is worth.

I also in the computer there should be a drive for software and a drive for the work files.

Cheers
Alan.

 

[frederic]

Another option is to purchase a four-drive Buffalo Terastation NAS server. Used on ebay they are fairly reasonable, and have two USB ports on the back, for a spare drive.

What you do is mount that drive on your MAC or your Windows PC, and store everything on the shared drive. Then at some regular occurance, the Terastation automatically backs up to the USB drive, creating a safe mirror "just in case".

Because the Terastations have RAID 5, if one of the four drives go kaput the thing still works and serves files - though without the redundancy feature working. This gives you enough to buy a replacement drive.

If you get the Terastation "live" model (which uses older, IDE drives up to 500gb) the memory inside is not soldered onto the motherboard, and you can upgrade it. Even though Buffalo says this is a worthless upgrade, I found that doing so noticably increases the performance of the unit because there's more memory to cache files that you request.

I have two of them - one for music data, one for application data. At this point the only thing on my Vista PC is the OS, the applications, and device drivers.

This way if the PC dies, I don't lose any data and I can rebuild it easily enough. You can also use programs like "clonezilla" to backup a windows PC to the terastation so if the PC dies you can just run clonezilla and pull the image back. Norton Ghost does the same thing but it's not free, though very, very good.

 

[cyrano]

I don't know if this will fit into your budget, but for backup have a look at the Drobo. It's RAID for mere mortals...

RAID is fine if you 're technically oriented. If not, it's an accident waiting to happen. That's where the Drobo is entirely different. It's not cheap, nor superfast, but for photography and audio it's fast enough.