Ideal Super Duper Setup?

[robmanning]

Hello,

I recently have had plenty of problems with my 4 yr old G5 which I use to compose music. My Hard Drive did many odd things which I have managed to get sorted.

During this whole frustrating ordeal I got introduced to Super Duper and I have just bought a new external Hard Drive to use as a backup drive, but can anyone recommend a setup to get me really covered?

I currently have G5 Power PC/3 GB RAM with 2 X 160GB Seagate Barracuda drives (7200 RPM, 8MB), one used as Hard Drive and the other as an Audio Drive. I also have a 1TB Lacie Big Disk (e SATA) for my sample libaries.

There are 60GBs free on Audio Drive, 68GBs free on HD, and 798GBs free on Lacie 1TB.

My internal HD appears to have died and I have just purchased a replacement (Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB ST3500630AS SATA-II 16MB Cache).

I want to be able to back up all my composer work and have a bootable backup aswell.

How would you recommend doing this? I am happy to buy more external hard drives, but how many should I get? and is there a make/size/speed that you recommend?

I was thinking about partitioning my Lacie Big Disk and using Super Duper to regularly backup all of my compositions.

Sorry to bombard you with questions, and thanks for all your help,

[dnanian]

Well, in general, you need a 1:1 relationship of source volume to destination. You can partition a particular backup drive to accomodate multiple source volumes, of course.

I wouldn't back up onto something you're already using for something (e.g. your Big Disk) -- you want some physical redundancy.

You can also rotate multiple backups to get yourself some redundancy (see the Introduction to the User's Guide).

Does tha thelp?

[ShosMeister]

The introduction does not give any instructions (nor searching through the entire guide) on how to do this. Being fairly intelligent with computers etc., I thought I knew how to do this. There seems to be an issue though.

I have two physical external drives. Each is partitioned to 5 partitions (Monday_BU, Tuesday_BU, etc). When I created the initial schedule, all seemed to work well. The next week though, when I changed the physical drive out, all of the backups failed indicating it could not find the backup volume.

Is SuperDuper using the name of the volume or some internal ID? If it's the name, why would it fail like this? Do I need to setup two separate schedules; one for each physical drive to run every other week?

Thanks!!!

[dnanian]

Send me a message to "support" and I'll provide you with some instructions that'll help, ShosMeister.

[robmanning]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for your help,

So would I be better to get another drive to achieve 1:1 ? and if so would you recommend setting it up as shosmeister had, ie 5 partitions (one per day)?

How would rotating backups achieve more redundancy?

Thanks,

[dnanian]

In general, it's a good idea to have some physical redundancy. If your drive isn't a high quality RAID unit (e.g. Infrant ReadyNAS, a WiebeTech TrayDock, the Drobo) then I wouldn't pack too many partitions on it, since if it fails you'll lose all of them, right?

Rotating backups achieves more redundancy because, well, you have more copies of the data across a longer period of time.

[robmanning]

Hi dnanian,

Thanks for that,

I have just bought two 320GB external hard drives and I am gonna partition them both into two, one partition for HD and the other for my audio drive, and then rotate the two drives.

I am also gonna partition my Lacie 1TB e SATA drive and have my audio archive on one partition and my sample library on the other, as well as burning two DVD's of completed projects, keeping one DVD at a seperate location.

Im hoping that will keep me covered!!

Thanks again,

[dnanian]

Sounds like a good plan!

[Soul_Survivor]

In my mind, it makes sense to have a backup drive with the same capacity of the original drive. I've done this for a few years with my PC.

When I ordered my new iMac, I got a 500 GB internal hard drive. Then I bought a couple Fantom 500 GB external hard drives.

Now I use SD to make a backup of my internal iMac drive to one of the Fantom 5600 GB external drives.