Well, the internal hard drive on my 3 week old G4 has just died. I have recovered maybe 70% of the data, and have learned my lesson... ALWAYS HAVE A BACKUP!!! This is a lesson that I must repeatedly learn the hard way.

So now I am shopping for backup drives. I have 105 GB's of data to back up (2 internal drives, 30 & 75 Gig.) I will be using Retrospect to back up. So the question is this... Should I buy a 20 GB tape drive, or an 80 GB Maxtor Firewire HD? Would the compression in Retrospect be able to take 105 GB down to 80 GB (keep in mind that most of the data on my drive is DV video from Final Cut Pro.)

Help!

Well... the 75 gig FireWire drive will set you back a fair bit, and once its full, its full.
If you can get a FireWire tape drive (to ensure support in OSX), go for that.
There you have unlimited data backup - just get more tapes.
I doubt you could compress 105 gigs of DV footage to 85 gigs.
Without re-encoding it, that is... which I assume you don't want to do (assuming you mean something like dropstuff?).
If thats not what you mean then yeah easy - sorenson will get that down heaps low.

Cipher13

Any recommendations for a good firewire tape drive? The Maxtor 80 GB hard drive that I am looking at is $360. All of the tape drives that I have seen are more expensive than that.

I don't know that a firewire backup device is necessary. We have an aiwa TD-U8000 tape drive and it is USB - and $400 CDN. We have 3 macs on our network and with Retrospect backups are easy! Even when I am working late and running Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark and GoLive at the same time - Retrospect chugs along in the background and has never caused a problem. You can even set your system to fire up in the middle of the night and run a backup, so the speed of FireWire is totally unnecessary.

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The Amazing Rando

I have not seen any USB tape drives advertised lately. Who makes them? When I checked out Outpost.com, they list several formats... Travan, Onstream, DAT, etc... Which format is the best?

What about internal drives? Does anybody make an internal tape drive for the Mac?

Travan is cheap and affordable. They are hard to find, but the guy I buy all my stuff from has them. You can email him at sales@themacdoctor.com. He pretty much knows everything about all Mac products.

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The Amazing Rando

The best new tech out there right now is The OnStream Echo or the Ecrix VXA. They are relatively inexpensive, fast, quiet and hold at ton! We have the Echo30 drive at work, and it's been great.

For a good discussion of high-capacity backup, check out this discussion at Macintouch.

I have been waiting for a FireWire tape backup for a while. 3 weeks ago I ordered the VXA. Ecrix is a great company with great customer service. The drive is beautiful, fast (I noticed 200MB/sec from Retrospect) , and holds more than any tape I have seen yet (66GB compressed). If you have an off site machine, you can simply hotplug the FW cable into a FW Mac and back up (I have an iMac at home that I back up as well as 6 computer setup at my office).

It is ,more costly than the OnStream version, but is much faster and the tapes hold more.

FWIW, I use USB VXA from Ecrix with Retrospect for my Macs at work and home, and for my Win'98 PC at home. They have USB and a new FireWre model as well. Hard to find better support or product nowadays, be it from Dantz or from Ecrix.

I believe that would be 200MB/min ;-) I doubt that the SCSI-->>Firewire bridge in the Ecrix can do more then 10MB/sec, and I have never seen Retrospect report a per second number. They are great drives though. Supposedly you can tweak the firmware on the Ecrix to optimize for local or network connected backup (another nice feature). Dantz can't can't seem to say enough good about them.

[QUOTE]Originally posted by craigthomas:
[B]I have been waiting for a FireWire tape backup for a while. 3 weeks ago I ordered the VXA. Ecrix is a great company with great customer service. The drive is beautiful, fast (I noticed 200MB/sec from Retrospect)

I was wondering about this one for a while, I'm going to buy a DV camcorder, and a Firewire drive. Can I daisy chain the DV camera to the FW drive, and the FW drive to my iBook. The FW drive has 2 firewire jacks. The hard drive doesn't really hold enough space to capture DV, so can I have it go directly to the Firewire drive? Or will there be a huge speed hit as I'm using 2 devices on 1 Firewire controller?

I just bought a iBook second hand. The original owner gave me a 2.5" IDE to Firewire HD enclosure(made by Datafab). It has the ability to use bus power or a external Power Supply (that I don't have). I put in a 1.1gb Hd from my PB Duo 2300c, In hopes of just transfering all my stuff that way. I switched it to bus power and pluged it in, it got power (because the LED lit up) but the HD didn't spin up. I tryed the same thing with a G4 with the same result. What is the problem? Does the Duo's HD take too much power to use bus power? Or is something wrong with the enclosure or what? I really want to get this thing working, but I don't want to buy a HD for it to find out it doesn't work. Thanks

mr100percent, I don't have experience capturing DV to an external firewire drive, so what I am telling you is second hand. That said, I don't think that any external firewire drive would be fast enough to capture DV without dropping frames. The reason... external firewire drives are not native firewire. They are just ATA drives with a firewire bridge. Your best bet would be to buy a bigger internal drive for capturing video.

With all respect Thunderbird you are talking cobblers. There have been the ocassional problem with some set-ups where firewire devices have been daisy-chained but in principle external Firewire drives are plenty fast enough for capturing DV without dropping frames. Even with an ATA-Firewire bridge these drives are capable of a sustained 8-14 MB/s which provides plenty of breathing space for DV's 3.6 MB/s requirement.