Time Machine! w00t! w00t!
I know I've used this shot on the blog before but it seemed appropriate.
Sunday – I was working in Lightroom on a shoot from earlier in the day and I noticed that my shots were importing at a snail’s pace. I figured a reboot was in order. It had been a while since I rebooted last (couple of weeks) so what the heck. Unfortunately, the laptop never came back up. I got the Apple logo and… nothing. Tried again, still nothing.
I have a mixed backup solution. I use Time Machine at home on a Lacie 1 TB USB drive, and my offsite backup is SuperDuper! on a Western Digital 500 GB FireWire drive. So I took the laptop to work and plugged in the SuperDuper! backup. The machine came to life. That let me know the problem was the drive. It’s my own fault really. I replaced the OEM drive with a 500 GB, 7200 rpm Seagate drive. I knew Seagate was a bit sketchy with quality control, and the 7200 rpm thing was pure machismo. The drive ran hot from day 1 and I guess it just burned itself out.
I stopped at the computer store to grab a new drive on the way home. After tearing the laptop apart and replacing the drive I booted from the OS X install disk and restored to a previous state in Time Machine. This got me back to within a couple of hours of where my drive died. I lost the import from the shoot I was working on, but that’s no big since the shots stay on my cards until I have the Lightroom catalog backed up in two locations.
So the take home lesson here is back up your stuff [pats self on back]. Time Machine is wicked awesome! SuperDuper! also rocks my world but for a different reason. Time Machine can get me back to the state that I need my laptop to be in but I can’t boot from it. It took me 2 days to get up and running (it would have been 1 full day if the laptop had died on a week day and I had been able to get and replace the drive that night). If I had needed the laptop to be up and running right away I would have been boned. Like say I was using my laptop to run a slide show at a wedding reception and my drive died that afternoon… boned. SuperDuper! can be a life saver in a case like that. Plug in an external FireWire drive Option+Boot pick the FW drive and you’re off to the races. Then replace and rebuild the drive with Time Machine at your leisure.
What I would change… I’m going to keep the Western Digital drive in the mix, I need an off-site backup in case my house gets robbed and I need to get my work on a new laptop. It’s fast and reliable, so it’s a keeper. The Lacie drive, is also rock solid, but the USB takes forever and I tend to load up the USB bus with a bunch of stuff so sometimes I have to unplug other devices to get the drive to mount, so that’s getting replaced with another Western Digital drive. I’d like the speed of FireWire 800, so I’m looking at the My Book Studio Line.
Ok, I just got back from Costco, and I picked up the FireWire 400 My Book… I know, I wussed out, but it’s still FireWire and I saved like a hundred bucks.
Also, I’d like to add another Super Duper backup to keep in my laptop bag, in case of that reception mishap. In that case, I need a 500 gig portable drive with FireWire because as I understand it you can’t boot a Mac from USB. So, if Seagate makes good on a replacement drive, it’s off to pick up a drive enclosure otherwise I’m looking at a Lacie Rugged drive or an iomega e-Go.
So what’s funny to me is how everyone talks about how cheap it is to shoot digital because you don’t have to pay for film, but no one mentions how much money you have to spend on hard drives. I’ve bought 9 this year and it looks like I’ll pick up at least 3 more before the end of the year. Still, cheaper than film.
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