[Helpdesk] Backups

[Jonas Skardis]

The one that I frequently recommend, is Maxtor, with their "one touch
backup" line. As always, I recommend Newegg for the drive.
(newegg's maxtor store)
http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/Brand.asp?Brand=1304
(newegg's external hard drive store)
http://www.newegg.com/ProductSort/Subcategory.asp?Subcategory=414
Prices range from $210 for a 300gig to $690 for a 1tb drive. The only other
thing that I think is critical, is to get the retrospect backup software,
and use it religiously.

There is a fair amount of confusion about retrospect as some people deem it
to be too complicated, however, I can attest to the fact, that when used
properly, it has the most reliable backup strategy, and can be among the
easiest to retrieve data from.

I should also mention, that nearly any drive out there will work, Western
digital, seagate (the new owners of maxtor), Hitachi, LaCie, even Toshiba.
The one thing is that *every* hard drive is an extremely fragile piece of
equipment, with a platter that spins at at anywhere from 4200 to 10,000
revolutions per minutes depending on the drive that you select. To add to
that a tiny armature floats less than a hairs width above the surface, and
as such, even a slight drop can irreparably damage a drive. The key, if you
want to avoid losing data, is to have lots of backups. There truly is
strength in redundancy.

One word of caution, I'm more than a little pessimistic about LaCie's  hard
drive offerings, as I have encountered an extraordinary amount of failures
with LaCie's cases and chipsets included in the drives. In fact, the common
fix for a failed LaCie drive, is to simply take it out of the LaCie case,
and put it in third party case. In fact, almost 100% of external drives are
simply a trumped up case that a reseller puts a plain vanilla drive in.
Thusly, you don't get too much for your money by buying a higher end drive,
over a lower end drive.

One last thing, is that when you buy a drive, you need to verify that it is
properly formatted for your mac, otherwise, you may be making an incomplete
backup to your drive that you will have trouble restoring from.

-Jonas P. Skardis
Mac Consulting (and hard drive boo boo repair)
577-2151


> So what is the hard drive of choice these days be it internal or external?
> LaCie, Western Digital. . .? I guess Toshiba is not on the list?
> 
> Vint Miller