[mdrdsr]

I purchased a MBP last October. I love this machine. I also have 2 External HDs that I use for primary (working) disk for my images and a boot partition and the other External HD for a backup copy of all images from the 1st External HD. I am considering making some changes/upgrades and would like some opinions. I am not going to discuss specific products as I would like to keep the discussion to the approach and not brand.

Main Purpose/Uses are for Digital Photography. I use Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom. These are the two main applications. I also run Parallels (usually when I am not doing my digital Photography work) to run MS Office apps.

Currently this is my setup:

MacBook Pro 15” 2.4 GHz, 2GB RAM (667), 160GB 7200 HD
• This internal drive is used for OS and Applications
• The Lightroom Catalog is also on the internal HD – /Users/myname/Pictures/Lightroom
• The CS3 Scratch Disk is also located on the internal drive

2 External HD – 500GB ; Western Digital My Book Pro (USB, FW400 & 800) Both connected via FW800. The second daisy chained to the first
• The first drive is partitioned into Two MAC OS Extended Partitions consising of a Boot Clone (150GB/80GB available) – as a backup of local documents (office, email, etc) that reside on my MBP internal drive and in case I need to boot from other than the internal drive. The other partition is for Storage (315GB/154GB available). This partition is where I keep all of my images (RAW, JPG, PSD, etc). This is the critical data.
• The second drive is a single partition also MAC OS Extended (465GB/304 Available). This single partition is a copy of the Storage partition from the 1st External Hard drive – another copy of my images.

I use SuperDuper to 1) refresh the Boot partition from my internal drive each night, 2) copy my data partition from External HD 1 to External HD2 each night.

I am considering the following changes. My goals are 1) Better performance specifically for CS3 and Lightroom (as well as in general) and 2) more robust backup protection.

• Upgrade to 4GB of RAM from 2GB
• Add another drive that will become my Primary Data Drive that contains all of my images and that I work from. Takes the place of the current 1st Drive that has the 2 partitions. I am considering 1 TB ; Raid 0; eSATA via card on my MBP. I will Partition this new drive in to 2 Partitions - 1) CS3 Scratch Disk
and 2) Primary Data Storage and working disk for all of my images
• The Current 1st 500GB External Drive will remain the same – boot partition and data partition. But, this drive now becomes on-site backup of the Primary storage from the new drive above as well as the Boot partition. Thus I now have my primary storage on eSATA Raid 0.
• The Current 2nd 500GB External Drive will be reformatted and partitioned to look just like the current 1st 500GB External Drive and will also contain a boot partition and a 2nd partition for my data. However, this drive will be refreshed every week and then taken offsite for safety and protection.

How does this sound?
Any major issues? Any “gotchas?”
How big should the CS3 Scratch Disk partition be?
Will I gain better performance?
Is this a better backup strategy now that I incorporate offsite refresh once per week?

Thanks so much for you input in advance. I really do appreciate it.

David

[mduell]

eSATA is the obvious way to go; more bandwidth and much lower latency than Firewire. For scratch you don't need a lot of space, just speed speed speed, so you want a high RPM drive; the (Veloci)Raptors* are the only 10k SATA drives available. A terabyte is a no brainer for your work drive. Some may think it's a waste of space since you're not going to use much of it, but that keeps performance up; performance really drops off as drives get full. You can also clone your internal drive here (put that partition at the logical end of the disk) since you've got plenty of space. Just about every eSATA enclosure also has USB, so it's bootable with Intel Macs. Seagate* has the edge for bandwidth (if you find yourself waiting for large files or similar to load), while Hitachi* has the edge for IO performance (if you find yourself waiting for thumbnails or similar to load).

One of your MyBooks for on-line backup and another for off-site backup is a good idea. Cloning the on-line backup to off-site backup weekly is a reasonable plan.

What are you using for/how are you doing versioning? Since you're just doing clones right now, I assume you're doing it as part of your workflow, but it could also be done with the backup system and I just want to make sure it's being done. Another way of saying this is how do you get back "that image you deleted last month"?

* I realize you stated you're not looking for specific products, but it seems relevant to mention best latency, best throughput, and best IO drives.

[mdrdsr]

Thanks for the response mduell.

I want to make sure that I was clear when I mentioned my workspace. My "workspace" is also where ALL my images exists. I don't have a subset of images that I then move to backup or anything like that.

Great ideas about booting from eSATA as it also has USB

You are correct, I am doing versioning as part of my workflow and not via backup system.

Thanks again.

[OreoCookie]

In my opinion your biggest deficit right now is the lack of a real backup solution. You rely on cloning -- which is a very bad backup solution. Once you clone a faulty drive state, you will lose your backups. If you accidentally delete a file you need and realize it just one week later, it's gone. If you use Leopard, I would get a new, fresh 1 TB drive dedicated to Time Machine -- which is a dead-easy and reasonable backup solution. Of course, if you want to/need to do backups in a more sophisticated manner, you will need good backup software as well. A reasonable proposal (without having heard details, of course) is that you keep a bootable clone of your OS installation which you don't need to update that often. Then let Time Machine take care of the rest: it will backup your data regularly (if the drive is connected) and automatically, you don't need to start a backup manually, but you can if you want to. Even if you do versioning, if you just clone your drive, a clone of a faulty data structure results in a faulty backup (think of silent errors).

If your main drive should fail, you can restore your drive directly from your Time Machine volume (including everything, it will have the same state as the last backup). This pretty much makes cloning obsolete, because restoring from a clone takes the same time as restoring from Time Maching. The only drawback is that you cannot boot Time Machine volumes.

If you want additional safety, you probably want to use more sophisticated backup applications.


RAM upgrade: go for it.

Regarding the storage: eSATA drives are the fastest storage solution, but there is probably no need to change the enclosures of your existing drives. However, depending on your file sizes, you might not need a dedicated scratch drive or so (from what you write, I actually doubt that you do). If all you do is retouch RAW files, I don't think you will need a dedicated scratch drive. If you plug in your external drives via USB or FireWire, it'll be slower than your internal drive, so if you want to speed up your workflow and insist on storing images on an external drive, it should be connected via eSATA.

Keep in mind that part of your data won't be mobile. Perhaps you will benefit more if you'd get an internal 500 GB drive instead.

[mduell]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie 

In my opinion your biggest deficit right now is the lack of a real backup solution. You rely on cloning -- which is a very bad backup solution. Once you clone a faulty drive state, you will lose your backups. If you accidentally delete a file you need and realize it just one week later, it's gone. If you use Leopard, I would get a new, fresh 1 TB drive dedicated to Time Machine -- which is a dead-easy and reasonable backup solution. Of course, if you want to/need to do backups in a more sophisticated manner, you will need good backup software as well. A reasonable proposal (without having heard details, of course) is that you keep a bootable clone of your OS installation which you don't need to update that often. Then let Time Machine take care of the rest: it will backup your data regularly (if the drive is connected) and automatically, you don't need to start a backup manually, but you can if you want to. Even if you do versioning, if you just clone your drive, a clone of a faulty data structure results in a faulty backup (think of silent errors).

While he does versioning in his workflow (which should cover the deleted file case), using Time Machine instead of cloning is a good idea IMO. If nothing else it's easier since it's done automatically in the background by the OS. Time Machine from the working drive to the on-line backup, then clone from the on-line backup to the off-site drive.

[OreoCookie]

Automatic versioning is great. I even use it actively in some cases now, I can easily go back to earlier versions of drafts of papers without having to manually save older versions in zip files (like I did in the past).

The OP doesn't sound like someone who likes to fiddle with a sophisticated backup software (e. g. Retrospect).