Comments on: Harddrive crash

By: Rickard

Rickard — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 10:10:46 +0000

I believe OSX supports software RAID (not sure which variants though), so that’s an alternative. Ideally, you want something like RAID5 so that you can continue to work on the machine even though one of the drives is busted. Performance will be horrible with a disk missing, but it’s possible. I doubt OSX supports RAID5 i software though.

I am cloning my data drive to a different disk (using SuperDuper). I’m also backing up most of the data in my home directory to Amazon S3.

DiskWarrior is pretty cool. I think I have it somewhere, but I haven’t used it yet. If you want even lower level harddrive recovery, you should have a look at SpinRite. The website looks like a blast from the past, but we’ve used the app to rescue quite a few failed drives here on campus. Spinrite works on all drives, regardless of file system. In order to use it on a Mac drive, you would have to take it out of the machine and connect it to a PC though.

By: Mange

Mange — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:31:21 +0000

True true, its about 5 grand SEK, but compared to the alternative I think its worth it. Especially the fact that you can continue work without stoppage, just shove in a new disk and Presto… Either way, you definitely should clone your home directory on another drive. Its a simple script, and it will make you sleep good at night, for sure.

Btw, I had a similar hard drive crash on an employees personal macbook, disk was totally smoked (Apples hard ware test didn’t even find the drive) and no back up (of course), but I ran DiskWarrior and managed to recover all the data, so I can really recommend it if that ever happens again.

http://www.alsoft.com/DiskWarrior/index.html

By: Rickard

Rickard — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 11:17:41 +0000

Yeah, but a RAID card for the Mac Pro isn’t exactly cheap :)

Amazon S3 is pretty affordable in my opinion. There’s been talk about Google potentially introducing an online storage cloud similar to S3 (gdrive), but I haven’t heard anything about it in a long time.

By: Mange

Mange — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 13:31:41 +0000

You should buy a hardware-RAID card, and use multiple disks, AND clone your startup drive and user to an external drive. Bullet proof. (unless your shit burns up or get stolen ;-)

Soon affordable on-line backup should be available, at last.

By: Theo

Theo — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 21:00:02 +0000

There’s a good article about Time Machine at Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/apple/reviews/2007/10/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/14

By: Rickard

Rickard — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 10:12:28 +0000

I’ll consider Time Machine. At the moment, I’m running SuperDuper and doing a full backup of my data drive every night. Then, once a week, I do a partial backup to S3 using JungleDisk (everything except iTunes and movies). JungleDisk works rather well, but the UI is horrible.

Edit: I should clarify. When I say a full backup every night, that doesn’t mean it copies everything. SuperDuper works like rsync.

By: Theo

Theo — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 17:09:51 +0000

Time Machine is easy to use and hard drives is cheep these days, that will get my vote. In case of disaster it’s possible to boot on the install media and do a full restore from Time Machine, or a partial if that’s what you want.