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Disaster Preparation: A Revision
©Fred Balin, MacResolutions
June 14, 2004
Fred Balin back after a hiatus, with another article on key Macintosh issues for our client base and subscribers.
But first the news:
Palo Alto, June 2004 --
• Itinerant cougars from the hills have meandered across the Kings highway to frolic in our parks, streets, and backyards.
• Intelligence indicates al Qaeda intends to attack the US in the coming months; threat level remains elevated.
• Under the Patriot Act, the FBI has the power to access your private medical, library, and academic records without you or anyone else knowing. Hospitals are already outsourcing your data overseas, where some has been held hostage in labor disputes.
• Your kids may be turned in under subpoenas from the Recording Industry Association of America.
• A recent report states that electronic devices, including computers in plastic cases, are a source of toxic dust.
• The global War on Terrorism is resembling a bottomless pit.
• The Big One murmurs beneath.
I haven't sensed this much anxiety since the '60s. Maybe the music will improve.
And this just in.
The weapons of mass destruction have been found!
They are widespread, reside in your community, and are very dangerous.
They include hacks, thefts, vandalism, viruses, and other sabotage; electrical spikes and mechanical failures; bugs, boo-boos, and natural disasters that can blow your precious computer data to smithereens.
As anti-hero Jack Gladney is told in White Noise, Don DeLillo's dark, yet comic tale of modern culture, "You are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that."
Well, not exactly.
But for some of us, it may seem frighteningly close.
* * * *
I discussed the crapshoot of preserving data integrity in a July, 2001, article Why You Will Lose Your Data.
Since then at least ten subscribers have reported crashed drives and/or lost data. Not all lost data could be retrieved, nor was it all backed up. Bonjour tristesse.
Later in 2001, I wrote a follow-up piece, Ten Steps to Effective Backups.
In that article, I recommended the use of tape drives in small offices, specifically the new Ecrix VXA-1. Times have changed.
* * * *
Today's report is meant to serve two purposes:
• To remind you of the imminent threat to your data, and
• To discuss my revised thinking on this issue.Let's all take advantage of the current "opportunity" of heightened anxiety to be better prepared for a potential data disaster.
* * * *
A NEW RECOMMENDATION
Regularly scheduled, automated backups to external media remain the cornerstone of an effective data protection regimen.
Three years ago I was a proponent of a new class of high-capacity tape drives, developed by Ecrix. The Ecrix VXA-1 drive could store up to 66 gigabytes of compressed data onto a single, small tape. Drive connections were via SCSI or a newer interface, FireWire.
I bought two Ecrix drives, tested them, and began implementing them with a number of clients; results were good. Cost of a VXA-1 drive was about $1000 and included 1 tape and a single-user version of Retrospect backup software. Additional tapes cost about $75 each; additional Retrospect "clients" to support network backups were about $25 each. Seemingly an expensive package, but not when compared to the potential loss without it. Do you buy life insurance?
Tapes have always had their drawbacks: They can stretch and sometimes break, they don't mount on you Mac's Desktop like disks, and they require specialized software, such as Retrospect. But their easy portability, and relative low-cost per gigabyte of media, made them popular. Ecrix's speed, error-checking, large tape capacity, and other advances gave them my nod.
Today Ecrix is part of a larger company and their support policy is less accommodating. More importantly, advances in connectivity and other storage technologies have moved me to a new backup storage recommendation: Firewire hard drives.
Here's why:
• FireWire hard-drive technology is now both ubiquitous and well-developed.
• FireWire hard drives can use standard 3.5" desktop or 2" laptop drives in their cases; the same drives that go in your desktop PowerMac and iMac or laptop PowerBook and iBook.
• Storage capacity of hard drives has increased dramatically, and the cost per gigabyte has plunged. Today 3.5" drives can hold 250 GB or more, at an average cost of less than a dollar a gigabyte. For example, a bare 120 GB Western Digital Caviar drive, the largest drive, that you can totally access in any PowerMac G4 (except the final "mirror drive door" model), can be purchased for less than $105.
[Note: If you have not replaced your older original PowerMac G4 hard drive since you bought it, I recommend doing it. You can also easily add a second hard drive in your G4 tower.]
• One or more FireWire ports is standard on all Macs made in the past few years. Firewire has a maximum theoretical throughput of 50 megabytes per second (FireWire 400) or 100 megabytes per second (FireWire 800). In the real world, your backup throughput speeds will be lower, but you can reasonably expect them to be several hundred megabytes per minute with a direct FireWire connection.
• Equally important, restoring data is much easier from hard drives than from tape. All data on tape is stored as the equivalent of one huge file spread across the tape. Retrospect refers to this as a backup set. To restore files across multiple backup set sessions, the tape drive must slowly wind and queue up at the proper spot for each session. This can be painfully slow, especially when you anxiously want quick access to backups of lost or damaged files. With hard drives, access to files in a backup set are, for all practical purposes, instantaneous. Restoring files spread over many backup sessions is much, much swifter than with tape.
• New hot-swappable FireWire hard-drive enclosures from companies such as Granite Digital enable you to physically remove the enclosed hard drive and swap it with another one, thereby emulating a rotating backup that you can do with a tape drive. My prefered Granite enclosure also sports a built-in "SMART" display that monitors the health of the enclosed drive.
* * * *
So here is my current recommendation.
• Use FireWire hard drives for backup storage.
• If affordable, purchase a Granite hop-swappable case, a second hard drive tray, a padded carrying case ($338 total) and a least two large ATA hard drives (say, 200 GB, at about $140 ea).
If this not in your budget, then go for a single, large, pre-built, FireWire drive and enclosure, such as those made by LaCie.
• As before, I recommend the use of Retrospect for backup software. The are other players in the game, and some have prooducts that are easier to use. [They include Backup, Apple's software sold as part of a Dot Mac account; Prosoft's Data Backup; La Cie's SilverKeeper, which comes with their hard drives, the excellent OS X shareware Carbon Copy Cloner, and synchronization tools from Qdea.
However, despite its longer learning curve, Retrospect is still my choice. It has the most features, longest experience, and enables backups of both Macs and PCs over the network. Another important difference is that Retrospect enables incremental backups (where prior versions of files are retained) in addition to Finder accessible "duplicates" or "clones" that the other products provide. For my clients, I generally set up both types, Retrospect incremental file backup sets and duplicates onto the same large Firewire hard drive.
Retrospect is now at version 6. It has been updated for Mac OS X v 10.3 (Panther), and the Desktop edition enables backing up of three machines over a network. One machine acts as the "sever", the other (Macs and/or PCs) are "clients." Price via mail order is under $100. Additional clients can be added at about $22 per client.
In addition to automated Retrospect backups to FireWire drives, and especially, if you do not swap drives and take one off-site, I recommend periodic burning of key data to DVD-R, the 4.2 gigabyte discs that Apple introduced with the SuperDrive.
For most efficient results, connect your Firewire backup drive to a Mac that also has a SuperDrive. Then the data duplicated to the hard drive is connected to the same Mac as the burner, making it easier to access and quicker to burn. If you don't have or can't afford a SuperDrive-equipped Mac, use any Mac with two FireWire ports and purchase an external DVD-Burner. LaCie's costs about $230 and includes a copy of Toast Titanium. Toast will significantly decrease the time required to burn optical media as compared to using Apple's free built-in disk-burning software.
So, take the appropriate steps to obtain and set up your backup system.
And remember, as Sergeant Phil Esterhaus said at the end of roll call in the 80s police show Hill Street Blues, "Let's be careful out there."
Fred Balin
6/14/04
MacResolutions
3790 El Camino Real, #2005
Palo Alto, CA 94306
650-565-8120
info@macresolutions.com
©2003,
Fred Balin, MacResolutions
All rights reserved.
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