Please talk about back-ups for a newbie

[RadDave]

RadDave, where did that chart come from? I'm surprised to see WD failures being the worst. I've had 3-4 Seagates crash, never a WD. I've got five of them on my various systems right now.

Hi Jake - in the past, I've previously posted a graph (multiple times) showing that the Seagate drives had a higher failure rate from Blackblaze which was outdated - so, just checked some more recent charts which brought up the graph shown in my last post - the Source was posted there, but check the reposting HERE - now, I read this article several times and what I cannot understand w/ this 'newer' graph is how the failure rate is determined? The Seagate HDs now seem to be in the middle of the mix but I'm not sure what these percentage rates mean over time, i.e. are these rates after a year or more? Let us know if you can figure out the graph - Dave

 

[toMACsh]

I don't think anyone addressed the size of an external. I've seen advice to get one at least twice the size of your hard drive. Other opinions....?

I had TimeMachineScheduler on my old Mac (Snow Leopard) but it didn't look like (yesterday) it had been updated to El Cap, so I purchased Backup Scheduler for Time Machine from the App Store ($4.99)

 

[MacInWin]

If you don't have much on the drive, twice the drive is a bit overkill. Twice what you use is good, as long as you aren't adding tons of stuff. And if twice what you use is less than the size of the drive or you plan to add stuff to the drive, I'd go drive+50% as a minimum.

TimeMachineEditor works on ElCap. I'm using it!

 

[MacInWin]

RadDave, this was an interesting comment at that website:

The Western Digital 1TB drives in use are nearly 6 years old on average. There are several drives with nearly 7 years of service. It wasn’t until 2015 that the failure rate rose above the annual average for all drives. This makes sense given the “bathtub” curve of drive failure where drives over 4 years start to fail at a higher rate. Still the WD 1TB drives have performed well for a long time.

And if you look at the data there, the other drives in the data are all much younger. It's not surprising they got higher failure rates. They really aren't comparing apples and apples in their report. Of course, they didn't claim to do that, either. A quick inspection of the similar age drive puts Seagate in the worst position. One drive had 222% failure rate (not sure how you do that, unless the same drive fails twice?) and almost all of them were pretty high.

HGST got good reviews, not surprising. I found this about HGST:

HGST, Inc. is a wholly owned subsidiary of Western Digital that sells hard disk drives, solid-state drives, and external storage products and services. Hitachi Global Storage Technologies was founded in 2003 as a merger of the hard disk drive businesses of IBM and Hitachi. Hitachi paid IBM US$2.05 billion for its HDD business.

IBM always built industrial strength drives designed to last a long time in critical applications and Hitachi was good, too, so combining those technologies should make for very, very solid drives. But a quick search (admittedly random) didn't yield any HGST drives in an enclosure, like a WD MyBook, for example. So if you want a bare drive HGST would be a good choice. Or you could assemble your own with an enclosure and an HGST drive. But given that HGST is a subsidiary of WD, I suspect the HGST technology will migrate to the WDs.

Thanks for the link. Interesting reading.

 

[RadDave]

RadDave, this was an interesting comment at that website: And if you look at the data there, the other drives in the data are all much younger. It's not surprising they got higher failure rates. They really aren't comparing apples and apples in their report. Of course, they didn't claim to do that, either. A quick inspection of the similar age drive puts Seagate in the worst position. One drive had 222% failure rate (not sure how you do that, unless the same drive fails twice?) and almost all of them were pretty high.

HGST got good reviews, not surprising. I found this about HGST:IBM always built industrial strength drives designed to last a long time in critical applications and Hitachi was good, too, so combining those technologies should make for very, very solid drives. But a quick search (admittedly random) didn't yield any HGST drives in an enclosure, like a WD MyBook, for example. So if you want a bare drive HGST would be a good choice. Or you could assemble your own with an enclosure and an HGST drive. But given that HGST is a subsidiary of WD, I suspect the HGST technology will migrate to the WDs.

Thanks for the link. Interesting reading.

Hi Jake - thanks for the more 'in depth' analysis from that link - the usually bar graph that I've shown before is below but seemed somewhat dated, so I was looking for a more recent evaluation - actually both are from the same company, i.e. Backblaze - I guess that the 'bottom line' is to avoid Seagate or since I still have several in operation of a half dozen to build in redundancy to a backup strategy. I wish that the new graph were constructed somewhat differently to incorporate the age of the HDs under assessment? Dave

ADDENDUM: Jake - concerning your statement above in bold about 222% - I was reading yet another article from Backblaze HERE - 'failure rate' is based on an annual determination, e.g. if 100 HDs died at exactly 1 year, then the failure rate would be 100%; however, if 100 HDs failed at 6 months, were replaced and then failed again at exactly 1 year, the failure rate would be 200%.
.

 

[pm-r]

pm-r, sadly macupdate isn't what it used to be. They have started 'bundling' their downloads with crapware. It's probably ok to use it to find the developer, but I have stopped downloading from them. Sad.

Thanks Jake, and yes that seems to be an unfortunate situation and they do have an almost buried explanation of why etc.

But in their defense(barely I might add!!), I tried one of the reported culprits, and as long as one pauses to read all the install dialogs etc. carefully, and who usually does that???, there's usually an option to skip the "extra installs" that might be attached.

But yes, macupdate is now a site to be aware of it seems, if and when downloading any Mac apps from three site.



- Patrick
======

 

[Dogbreath]

firensteel....I quickly read your thread. +1 on skipping Flip4Mac and Perian. VLC can handle almost every format of media files.
Also, once you connect an external hdd, your Mac will ask you if you want to use it for Time Machine. If you agree to that, TM almost sets itself up.

 

[Demapples]

Consider encrypting a portable Time Machine backup drive. That way if it is lost or stolen then it cannot be opened by a third party. Easily done with tools in OSX.

 

[MacInWin]

ADDENDUM: Jake - concerning your statement above in bold about 222% - I was reading yet another article from Backblaze HERE - 'failure rate' is based on an annual determination, e.g. if 100 HDs died at exactly 1 year, then the failure rate would be 100%; however, if 100 HDs failed at 6 months, were replaced and then failed again at exactly 1 year, the failure rate would be 200%.
.

RadDave, that may be the way they did it, but it makes a sort of mockery of the stats. What they should have done to be logically consistent is to have counted every drive they had to use and then show the failure rate at 100%. That way the "age" of the drives would be very small, showing that the drives suffer failures quickly. A better way to show the differences also would have been to show the "bathtub" charts for each brand, or each size drive. Drives tend to fail either quickly (the so-called infant mortality) or after a good long time (the WD's that were getting on 6-7 years in service). It's very rare for a drive to fail once it's past the infant stage and not yet old. There actually is a reason for that--infant mortality is caused by weak components that can pass a short term test, but fail quickly when under a consistent workload in service while failure when age is caused by wear and tear on the moving parts, mostly. Or overheating as electronic components get millions of cycles on them. And that's why few fail in the middle. The weak get killed off quickly and it takes a while for the wear and tear to do real damage. So what I look for from a vendor is a good history of replacing drives that die of infant mortality quickly. Length of the warranty is less critical, for me, as all drives die eventually. I just want the new ones replace quickly and without fuss.

 

[toMACsh]

I had TimeMachineScheduler on my old Mac (Snow Leopard) but it didn't look like (yesterday) it had been updated to El Cap, so I purchased Backup Scheduler for Time Machine from the App Store ($4.99)

TimeMachineEditor works on ElCap. I'm using it!

Not the same

 

[MacInWin]

I know, I was just adding that I know that one works, even if the other doesn't (or may not, as you said). My intent was to give the reader the name of a product that does work with El Cap. Sorry for any confusion.

 

[toMACsh]

I know, I was just adding that I know that one works, even if the other doesn't (or may not, as you said). My intent was to give the reader the name of a product that does work with El Cap. Sorry for any confusion.

No apologies necessary. I just wanted to be clear on what I said.

Does TimeMachineEditor cost anything? Backup Scheduler for Time Machine is 5 bucks from the App Store. (as mentioned above)

 

[MacInWin]

TME is free, and was last updated Jan 1, 2016.

http://timesoftware.free.fr/timemachineeditor/

 

[firensteel]

Hi guys, a follow up here. Today I received my new 2TB Fantom G Force ext HD and set it up with my MBP. Time Machine took over and did everything completely automatically. Formatted the drive for Mac and performed the first back-up ( 40GB, cos I loaded a SDHC card from my Sony Handy-CamHD onto the MBP when I first got it). I guess my question would be why would I need Super-Duper, if Time Machine did this back-up by itself?
Now I can take the video off my MBP until I need to work on it and free up my 128GB internal flash drive, it is on my ext HD and still on the camera's card.
Thanks for the continued help.
Steve.

 

[chscag]

I guess my question would be why would I need Super-Duper, if Time Machine did this back-up by itself?

Because Time Machine backups are not bootable whereas a proper backup using SuperDuper is.

 

[firensteel]

Ok, I guess I am unclear on this.///Because Time Machine backups are not bootable whereas a proper backup using SuperDuper is.///
My ext HD is a bootable device,"as long as the hardware and OS support booting from eSATA or USB. "
Could you explain why the preference is for a "bootable" back-up, thanks again.
Steve.

 

[RadDave]

Ok, I guess I am unclear on this.///Because Time Machine backups are not bootable whereas a proper backup using SuperDuper is.///
My ext HD is a bootable device,"as long as the hardware and OS support booting from eSATA or USB. "
Could you explain why the preference is for a "bootable" back-up, thanks again.

Hi again Steve - well, your external HD can be formatted to be bootable, but if used for TM backups, then will NOT boot your computer - please look at the two images below from my MBPro - I've plugged in one of my two TM external HDs for that machine (I like redundancy) and also one of my dual partition CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner - similar to Super Duper) external HDs which is doing a bootable cloned backup of my MBPro & my iMac - when I open Finder, 3 drives are mounted (see first image), i.e. my TM backup + the two partitions of the other drive; however, when I look in System Preferences -> Startup Disk (second image), I'm given the options shown, i.e. boot to my internal HD (in the middle) or boot to one of my CCC clones - the TM HD does NOT show up as being bootable.

Why might this be important, well if your computer's HD died suddenly, a bootable clone would allow you to be up and running (of course depending on when you made your last clone); however w/ only TM, you would need to boot into the recovery partition, if possible - if your internal HD was completely dead, then TM alone would be of no help until you replaced the internal HD and then recovered your files from the TM backup. I believe that many of us here use both TM and cloning software (I do X2 for each) - I also have an external SSD to backup my personal files on my laptop & an online service (Carbonite) to backup my wife's personal files on our iMac, which she uses. The only other addition I could add is offsite backup (like keeping an updated HD in my bank vault in case my house was destroyed!). Hope this helps - Dave
.

 

[MacInWin]

As RadDave has shown, there is a difference between TM and cloning (CCC or SD!) backup. TM is a hierarchical backup, that is, it keeps changes to files for as long as it has space on the backup drive to do so. So if you accidentally make a change to a file and need the original back, you can use TM to go back in time to retrieve an older version. Hence the name,"Time Machine." That's Apple's little joke. And although TM backups up everything on the boot drive, the way it backs up is not bootable.

Clones, on the other hand, are bootable because they are true clones, one for one. But most cloning software doesn't keep an hierarchical backup that is easy to use. CCC, for example, keeps an archive folder if you turn on Safety Net, but that folder has to be searched to find the older file you may want and that isn't always easy to do. But it boots, which means, as I have said before, that if your internal drive dies, you can keep going with the clone while waiting for the replacement HD to arrive, then once it's installed you can clone back to the new internal and be on your way.

I use both, as RadDave said he does. I view TM as the "Oh, crap, I deleted an important file" backup and CCC as the "Oh, crap, the internal drive just died" backup. But you don't HAVE to have both and neither is "better" than the other. They are two different ways to do backups and how YOU decide to go depends on your tolerance of risk and budget. There is no single right way to do it, as long as you have backups.

 

[firensteel]

Thanks guys, very useful points in each of your posts, I appreciate the time you took to answer me.
I like McInWin's line "tolerance of risk and budget."
I don't generally use highly valuable files, I edit video from my Sony camera to create Grandparent flash drives of my son, etc. I always have a back-up of that on the original SDHC cards. Nothing else I do is important to my work that I don't already have a back-up of.
If my hard drive failed now its off to Apple for warranty repair. How often, if ever, has that occurred for you guys ,btw?
Thanks a lot for your continued advice.
Steve.

 

[Dogbreath]

Steve . . . my 2010 Mac Mini's hdd failed after 2 years and 11 months. I had just days to go on my extended 3 yr Apple Care warranty when it died. The Apple Store in Charlotte promptly replaced my hdd and gave the Mini a check up before returning it to me. The replacement hdd is still going strong (at this minute), but it is pushing 3 years now and things could change almost instantly-. I have 2 ext hdd...one for Time Machine and the other one is a bootable CCC clone drive. If there is a "next" hdd, I will be installing a ssd from OWC.

My "highly valuable files" are stored on flash drives, as well.