[fishguy]

What do you recommend? Right now I have a macpro intel with sonnet 4-drive external enclosure that contains a single 1 TB drive. I dedicated that drive to time machine and its full. Can I add another 1TB drive and combine them (raid)? Is it safe as a back-up? Or is there a different and better solution. At this point I should be planning at least 3TB of back-up so I don't have to go through this next year. I have lots of video and images. I'm not a pro but the data is worth a great deal to me and my family. Internal drive bays are full - raptor 160 boot drive, 1TB, 500GB, 300GB(?).

[ginoledesma]

You'd most likely need to migrate the data from one Time Machine volume to another (you can do this using Carbon Copy Cloner, Disk Utility, etc). I also take it you'll be moving to a bigger RAID volume (e.g. bigger RAID-1 or RAID-5). You really don't want to go for RAID-0 to expand your volume, as one drive failure will bring down the entire array — bye bye backups when that happens.

My suggestion would be either to:
1) Build a bigger RAID volume (e.g. 4-drive RAID-5)
2) Keep Time Machine as is, and do your own, separate backups (using Backup.app, SilverKeeper, Retrospect, DejaVu, etc)

If your data is that great of a deal, you will want to invest in separate backups.

[OreoCookie]

If you combine them in any RAID level (there are 2+1, so `combine them to a RAID doesn't say much), you will invariably lose all data.
RAID0 Striping. Makes things faster, doubles your disk space, but if one drive fails, you will lose all your data.
RAID1 Mirroring. You don't gain anything in terms of disk space, but it protects you against drive failure.
JBOD Just a bunch of disks, it concatenates disk space, but if you lose one drive, you lose all your data.

If you want to expand your Time Machine drive's capacity, only two levels are of interest, but in any case, I don't think it's a good idea to use a software RAID, because it depends on the OS functioning properly.

I'd rather look for alternatives: do you really need 3 GB of continuous storage? If so, have a look at either an NAS (= network attached storage) with space for four drive bays or a Drobo. All of them are about the same in terms of speed, but all of it will be more expensive than you think (it's not just the price of a drive you pop in).

[fishguy]

OK, I guess I'm getting too complicated. I'll keep things as they are except remove one video hard drive from time capsule. I'll get a second seagate 1TB drive and look into a separate back-up software. Which do you recommend?

On a separate note, when I place a drive on time machine's list of items to not back up, it will presumably not affect anything on the back-up hard drive prior to that point. I.e. I won't actually free up any space on the back-up drive. Once I buy and set up a second hard drive as a back-up I need to make space on the Time Machine drive so that it can continue to back-up data going into the future. How can I clear data on the Time Machine drive that will be backed up on the second back-up drive? To try and make this more clear, I will set up drives so that Drives A,B, and C (all in MacPro) are backed up with time machine to drive E (external enclosure). Then using second software, I back-up drive D (in mac pro) to a new drive F (external enclosure). Once I do this there will be quite a bit of data on drive E that is now being backed up on drive F. How do I eliminate this data while preserving the rest of time machine?

I'm tired and don't know if any of this makes sense. All I know is I have a TB drive full and time machine is balking at this.

thanks

[misterdna]

FISHGUY, I'm not sure what I think of your current plan (you mention "time capsule" -- I assume you mean Time Machine?). My thought is that you could set up your RAID (level 5 with four 1TB drives makes sense to me), then clone your current TM (Time Machine) drive to the RAID, and then have Time Machine keep backing up to the RAID. Someone will need to confirm this will work, because I'm not a TM expert. However, you will eventually fill up your RAID, then you'll be back in this situation again...

Actually, I think it might serve you best to take a step back and describe your overall situation more and let some experts on this board make some big picture suggestions on an overall backup plan. How much data are you creating per year? How much of it needs to be backed up? How long does the backed up data need to be saved? How critical is the data? How quickly do you need to recover your data? How paranoid are you? Are you keeping data off-site? Every situation is unique, depending on the data, your job, etc. I think the experts on this board can give you better advice if you give them all the broad details of your data and your backup goal, rather than the trying to sort through the details you mention in your most recent post.

I myself am nutty about backing up. Currently I use Time Machine (just started using it a few months ago) to a 1TB internal, plus I clone my entire system every week to one of two 1TB externals (I rotate them), plus I run Retrospect from a 2nd machine that copies important folders to the 2nd machine's spare drive. I also archive completed projects to DVDs, and also copy the projects to a hard drive reserved just for completed project. There's probably too much redundancy, but that's just my paranoid style. I used to do incremental backups to tape (and later to REV disks) using Retrospect, but stopped for various reason. When I fill up my internal 1TB TM disk, my plan is to treat the drive as an incremental backup and file it away in a safe. Then I'll start using a fresh 1TB disk for TM (or maybe 1.5TB by then). Instead, I could use Retrospect to do incremental backups to 1TB drives (which would spare me from the redundant data of starting TM fresh with new 1TB drives each time one fills up), but I have really taken to TM, so I'll live with some redundant data (which makes me feel more secure anyway, in case one drive fails).

[OreoCookie]

Good points.
Perhaps you can just get a new drive and an enclosure and start with a new 1 or 1.5 TB drive once the old one is filled to the brim. This would be cheaper and easier.

Note that this is just necessary if you want to keep backups which are older than a certain point in time, then you don't even need to get a new drive.

If you want to delete backups of files or files as a whole, this is quite simple: launch Time Machine and navigate to the point in time when you want to delete the files from. Then navigate to the file/folder you would like to delete. Select delete from this/all previous backups from the cogwheel menu and presto.

If you want more finegrained control, you need dedicated backup software à la Retrospect or Synk. CCC, SuperDuper and the likes won't help.

[fishguy]

Thanks for the input. Here is my situation:

I have 4 drives in my Macpro: 1) boot/application (160 GB), 2) multimedia (music, still images, documents - 500 GB), 3) Video 500GB, and 4) Video 1 TB. I have no space issues on Drives 1 + 2. Drive 2 is just less than half full so I have plenty of room to grow. Drive 3 is nearly full, and I just got started on Drive 4 so there is only 50 GB for now. I do still photography and add still images on a fairly regular basis, but also edit many out. Based on the past year or 2 I'm not filling drive 2 all that quickly. Drive 3 has projects from past years, several of which need to be edited. That will free up space on that drive, but for intents it is full. I now download video onto drive 4 and estimate that it will take a 2-3 years to fill. I tend to download a few projects and then edit, which drastically cuts down the GBs. So the current drive arrangement (except I need a scratch disk) should be fine for me over the next 3 years. Furthermore, I can always go to replace drives 2 and 3 with 1TB drives.

I also have a sonnet fusion 4-bay enclosure with sonnet tempo esata card. I currently have 1 drive in the enclosure, a 1TB dedicated to time machine and my Aperture vualt. I was told to remove the aperture vualt from time machine and run it seperately. My back-up drive is now full. That leaves 3 vacant slots in the enclosure. However, I know I need a dedicated scratch disk and will buy one soon.

Incidentally, any recommendations on a scratch disk? I was thinking of a seagate 500 GB. Final cut express will be the most demanding, not photoshop.

Ok, that leaves me 2 slots in the enclosure and a full time machine drive. So knowing this set-up, and that I'll need 2 TB for Time machine, what would you recommend?

Thanks and sorry I was not clear in previous posts.

[OreoCookie]

With that kind of data, you should have separate backup strategies for different kinds of data. From the top of my head:
(i) Use Time Machine to back up your normal data located on drive 2. I think 1 TB is plenty for a 500 GB drive.
(ii) Since you use Aperture and vaults, I think you're covered here. Time Machine and Aperture now work together, so in principle, you could even add your Library to your Time Machine backup in addition to vaults.
(iii) Do not use Time Machine for video data. Time Machine doesn't handle large files efficiently, because whenever you change even 1 bit of your large video file, the whole file needs to be copied. In the intermediate future, when Apple makes the switch to ZFS, this will not be an issue anymore, but for the time being, it is.

For your video files, I could picture a few strategies: a simple one of them is to get external drives and offload videos of past years for archiving purposes.

For your current setup, the plan might look something like this: get an additional drive and merge the data on drives 3 and 4. Use Drive 3 as a scratch drive. Regularly copy old projects to an external drive. Once that is full, get a new external drive and start anew. I would also copy finished projects onto DVD or so (for system backups, DVDs have become pretty useless, though). If you want to keep things synced, you can also use Synk to automate your backups. Synk Pro can even backup to multiple targets (i. e. multiple external harddrives) at the same time. (Synk starts at $25, I think, Synk Pro costs $45).


Stuff to get
- 2x1 TB drives which you put in your 4-bay enclosure (you still have one vacant slot), one for Time Machine, one for old video projects.
- Synk or another backup software (optional)

If you want a fast scratch drive, get another drive (which is `large enough') to replace your other 500 GB drive, migrate the data from your 500 GB drive to the new drive and create a RAID0 from the two 500 GB drive. This will give you 1 TB of capacity at roughly twice the speed (linear read/write) of a single 500 GB drive.

So it seems to me that your problems can be solved with minimal investments and a little thinking Your data structure doesn't necessitate a RAID system and I think the proposed solution is easier to manage for you as well.

[tadd]

I use a 2TB external HD box for time machine. This is the only way I could figure to get > 1TB of time machine. The external is a western digital '2TB MYBOOK' with firewire 800+400+USB2 connection. They are available on Amazon and Apple's on-line store as well as other more competitive outlets.

For photo archival I recommend putting a HD in your external housing and name it photo_archive or something. Every time you put an image into that HD, copy it also to DVD or CD and take that media off-site or put it into a fire proof box someplace. Now delete that image from your main set of drives so you don't end up backing it up all the time.

For video archival you still have a problem since much of the video source material won't fit on DVD. For those video files that do, repeat the same as above. For those video files that don't it might be worth obtaining another external HD drive, like my WD book, and using that as the off-site/safe store. Again, keep a copy locally on an 'archive' store and off-site in the portable store. Again the video comes out of the backed up set of drives.

This philosophy keeps the time machine storage size reasonable. For me the above strategy keeps my internal drive set at about 2.1TB capacity, 50% used, and leaves some level of security. All that should be on the internal drives, and backed up to time machine are my own products, my applications, the OS, raw material I haven't archived yet, and most of all, organized sets of files for presentation, including the iTunes library.

Tadd