All your Hard/USB Drives Are a Ticking Time Bomb Part 2
I have to be honest with you folks, usually when i write some of these articles, i am biased with something which i felt had worked pretty well for me and wanted to share it with the
world. These scenarios i am about to illustrate have some direct product associations for a reason: i have seen them work in one way or the other. i welcome the idea of constructive criticism and correction on any of the items i amy have been referring to.
In Part 1 of this doom and gloom HDD scenario, i hope i didn’t put you off! The idea was to have “the audience” really connect to what i have experienced in the fast changing of tech. To make a close approximation of what your will need, most hard drive manifactures will have the following postings on their packaging to storage guide you :
This is a typical listing of a 1 Terabyte drive (which is 1000 Gigabytes)
- Up to 285,000 digital photos
- Up to 250,000 songs (MP3)
- Up to 25,000 songs (uncompressed CD quality)
- Up to 76 hours of Digital Video (DV)
- Up to 440 hours of DVD quality video
- Up to 120 hours of HD video
So without any further introduction and metaphors, let me continue the backup journey by showing you in various ways of-protecting your data.
Scenario 1
What can i do on the cheap / your still not totally redundant but its a good start
For Macs: 
1. Get an external USB hard drive bigger than your internal one
2. Turn on TimeMachine (OR TIM) by clicking on this icon 
3. The rest of the screen instructions will carry you through
If sounds this simple, thats because it really is that simple! By default TM is backing up your machine
every hour on the hour intervals. Seriously its that easy! (more on TM)
For Windows (2000 / XP / Vista / Windows 7) 
1. Get an external USB hard drive bigger than your internal one
2. Get a free tool called Cobian Backup
This free tool and allows the user to set intervals and spacing for the target files or the entire system files.
Pros and Cons of this approach:
Regardless of your a PC or a Mac, this fee or the cheap approach has its limits:
Pros: Easy to setup and use / free software and no licensing costs
Cons: The biggest flop with this is its all centralized in one backing up hard drive.
Outcome: if this one external drive fails (which it will one day with usage) you have lost all your backup of years and years of accumulated data.
Recommendations:
1) Try adding a scond external USB drive to your setup so you can at least backup the backup. (under a Mac you might need to tinker with iDisk to build a manual 2nd drive / in Windows just ask Cobian to back up a 2nd set of files to the 2nd USB drive)
2) Try to be selective of the files and folder you absolutely want to back up rather than just backup everything.
3) If you can spend a bit more money for the single drive consider getting the MyBook Essential for windows and Mac users.
http://www.caldigit.com/VR_mini/vr_mini_techspecs.html
i want to know more about this quick and easy it has everything
Size and weight
● Height: 2.07 inches (5.25 cm)
● Width: 3.25 inches (8.25 cm)
● Depth: 5.49 inches (13.95cm)
● Weight: 1.54 lb (0.7 kg)
Host Interface
● eSATA x 1
● Firewire 800 X 1
● Firewire 400 X 1
● USB 2.0 x 1
and runs on an existing port without a POWER BRICK! The only bad thing with this: it costs 650USD for a 640 drive! someone need to give this puppy a test run
More on various interfaces if your looking for speed:
eSATA is 150 MB/sec or 300 MB/sec
FW800 is 800 Mb/sec or 100 MB/sec
http://www.macworld.com/article/57653/2007/05/owc.html
for FW800 i can tell you guys that its about 3 minutes to move 25GB’s from a hard drive. Better yet about 3 hours for restoring a TimeMachine data when my iMac had died. I had a FW800 Drive which was hooked up at the time.
another great article similar to the backup paradigm
http://www.macworld.com/article/141363/backup.html
“The no-worry backup plan
Get the right amount of data protection for peace of mind
by Rob Griffiths, Macworld.com
As our lives grow increasingly digitized, more and more valuable and irreplaceable things reside on our computers. For instance, I have 15,000 digital photos, nearly 4,000 songs, a dozen or so movies, all of my family’s financial data, and countless personal and professional documents. Losing any of it would be an unpleasant experience, to say the least. So backing up my files is vitally important to me.” MacWorld
there was a great discussion on LinkedIn that talks about a backup experience in Tiger and not leopard
http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=51983&discussionID=6239498&commentID=5872420#commentID_5872420
Look for the Mac User Group, topi is, “Backing up system on Portable Hard Drive – OS X 10.4.11 Tiger”
[...] IOGear Multimedia Keyboard with Laser Trackball and Scroll Wheel, 2.4GHz Wireless GKM561R (Black) Your well under 1000USD (3750 SAR) with this setup and i think with the new Windows 7 all those 3 or 6 family members would be relatively happy. Oh and you will need some backup software to backup all the Windows user accounts on this machine. I would suggest reading my Backup article [...]