Backup options for my iMac

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I have a 2011 iMac with 1TB internal drive which is over half full.

As a back up I have a 1 TB drive which backs up vis super duper.

I want to setup something more robust especially for all my pics.

I was thinking about moving the 1TB drive to a time machine backup workflow and use super duper to back up to a RAID 1 setup like the WD studio edition or a NAS

Not sure if a NAS is much benefit as the iMac is permanently left on so I can access everything through my iPhone & iPad.

Any suggestions and recommendations on particular kit would be appreciated.

I like the whole DROBO thing but a little put off by the cost and proprietary encoding system.
 

chscag

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I have basically the same setup. What I have done is have two external hard drives; one to use for cloning (CCC or SuperDuper) and the second for Time Machine. The NAS and RAID is certainly an option but I believe in keeping things simple. And as you indicate the DROBO is too costly.
 
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Thanks for that. Are you using regular drives and if so what are they?

or

Are you using 1 of these integrated RAID setups like the WD studio edition that come with 2 drives in a housing that are preconfigured to RAID 0 or 1?


Does this really offer any advantage and if so would you run time machine on it or the super duper clone?
 

IWT


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I do the same as chscag.

I have a LaCie 1.5 TB EHD linked to Time Machine and use another LaCie 1.5 TB EHD, dual partitioned to which I clone my SSD and Internal Hard Drive using SuperDuper!

You don't mention what photo editor you use for your "pics". If iPhoto, you can copy the library to any EHD. If you use Aperture, it allows you to copy the library to a "vault" which can be any EHD. You can have as many "vaults" as you can afford.

Like you, my images are sacred and loss of them would be devastating in the extreme — so in addition to TM and the Cloning I mentioned above, I keep two Aperture "vaults" up to date. Maybe a bit OTT; but only until disaster strikes.

Ian
 
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I use Aperture 3 with managed libraries

I have a vault created on the external drive which I update on a regular basis.

I am thinking about possibly a DROBO as a lot of people are using them and they are upgradable in the future.
If I were to go this route I would move the WD drive to b my TM backup drive.
 

IWT


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I have used Drobo. I's easy to set up and use, there's good support from Drobo itself (in the UK anyway) and it has the advantage that you can configure the set up to allow for one Drive failure (default position) or two Drive failures; but you need a minimum of three Drives for this. Also it's upgradable with higher capacity Drives appearing all the time.

But, and a big but — it's really expensive. For the price, you can purchase several (many) good quality EHDs. Up to you really

Ian.
 
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Good evening,

I am new to the Mac environment, so please accept my apology if this is a redundant inquiry. I just recently purchased an iMac 27in (love it) and migrated over from a PC.

My 1st inquiry is that I have several small programs that are just windows based and was considering going the boot-camp route or even using Parrellels. How much disk space should I allocate for Win7 (64bit)? Although I have office for windows, I just acquired office for Mac so I won’t be doing much in the windows environment only for personal programs that are only windows based.

My 2nd inquiry is I currently have the following types of external hard drives all Western Digital (1TB, 2TB, 2nd 2TB, 3TB-Mybook Live). I purchased the 1TB & 2TB quite awhile ago way before I consider purchasing a Mac. I used my 1TB where I store all of my movies in an iso format via Clone DVD. I then transfer movies to my portable 500gb drive to view the movies on my WDTV Live (didn’t want a large HD sitting on my HT cabinet). I currently used only one of my 2TB HD to back up my music, photos, home videos, and certain files prior to my migration to the Mac. The 2nd 2TB has never been used. I got the 3TB Live figuring I can load a back up or 2nd copy of photos, music, movies and access them over the net on my iphone4, or iPad2.

Given my current hardware, how should I best utilize these external drives? I know I should consider going the route of a drobo or even HP Home server (ebay), but these HD were purchase sometime ago I can’t return them, with the exception of the 3TB Live. I want to best utilize what I currently have; now that I have this new amazing iMac, and figure I should ask for some expert advice here.

Any information, guidance or suggestions anyone can provide will be greatly appreciated, thanks for your time and support on this.

Best regards
Eddiesalsa
 

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