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Well, it finally happened... I had a hard drive failure in my 27" iMac. I have been using computers for a very long time and this is a first, for me. I know the phrase regarding drives: "it's not a question if it fails but when" so I guess I have just been incredibly lucky. The good news: drive replaced, no charge (AppleCare) and everything was backed up by TimeMachine. I am now waiting for TimeMachine to do its thing --- close to 900 GB on a 1 TB drive being restored ("About 2 hours and 55 minutes remaining"). Let's hope it all goes well.

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I just had the HD on my 744T fail after who knows how many takes, lots. I've heard that the Time machine backup works well Jeff. I haven't had a HD failure on my Imac but the screen got a bunch of vertical lines and Apple replaced it because it was a known issue...on a 5 year old machine! Good company.

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Well, it finally happened... I had a hard drive failure in my 27" iMac. I have been using computers for a very long time and this is a first, for me. I know the phrase regarding drives: "it's not a question if it fails but when" so I guess I have just been incredibly lucky. The good news: drive replaced, no charge (AppleCare) and everything was backed up by TimeMachine. I am now waiting for TimeMachine to do its thing --- close to 900 GB on a 1 TB drive being restored ("About 2 hours and 55 minutes remaining"). Let's hope it all goes well.

You've been very lucky. I've had a lot of drive failures over the years, some really inopportune...and lost sounds I'll never get back. Back up and archiving are one of the many conundrums that come with the convenience and power of computer-driven work. Most backup plans aren't very good, but you have to have one anyhow. Production people seem to have their minds around this pretty well now--data wranglers make two copies of everything on-set, for starters. My big problem is with post clients, who pretty much expect that I can resurrect a project they did a few years ago after they've misplaced the drive I gave them when we finished. It DOES happen that the primary and backup drives can both fail, I think 3 is the actual real number of copies one needs for anything digital. And that's just for now--for permanent archives....who knows?

phil p

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On those iMacs and Minis... computers where you can't easily replace the drive:

I've taken to running 2 Firewire externals: one with all my working data, and another for Time Machine (which backs up the first external as well as the internal). That way if/when the machine has to go back for Applecare I haven't lost anything, not even time to set up another machine... and my friendly local authorized repair shop doesn't have access to anything important.

Saved my bacon a couple of times...

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Years back, when drives were more expensive and my backup procedures where not what they are today, I set up a newly purchased computer and then booted up the old one to begin the process of moving files... only to discover that the drive in the old computer chose that EXACT moment to die. It was making a horrible knocking sound... and I was just one boot away from not even caring. I called Maxtor and held the phone up to the computer case so the guy could hear it. Then he calmly said, shut down the computer, remove the drive and send it to some data recovery outfit in Denver. Crap. I called Denver and explained the situation... and partway through, realizing I was talking really fast, apologized to the guy for sounding so completely frantic. He said "That's ok... we get that a lot. Would you like to speak with our Data Recovery Crisis Counselor?" What! There is such a thing? Yup. He said they hired her away from the Denver Suicide Hotline. I guess her skills carried over pretty well.

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I've taken to running 2 Firewire externals: one with all my working data, and another for Time Machine (which backs up the first external as well as the internal).

You are a very wise man -- that's exactly what I've done for years. If the computer crashes big-time, I just grab the data drive, slap it onto a laptop, and at least I can keep working. Backups have saved my bacon many times.

DriveSavers in Novato, CA has had booths at trade shows over the past 10 years, and they posted all kinds of disastrous pictures of massive data loss when drives have burned up, wound up in 20 feet of salt water, run over by cars, etc. One of the best was a signed photo by a bunch of Simpsons producers and writers, who had lost a half-dozen scripts on a crashed drive. DriveSavers recovered them all and saved them weeks of rewriting. Now, they back up.

Note that this kind of data recovery costs thousands of bucks. I think they start at around a couple of grand for a 500GB drive and it goes up from there...

--Marc W.

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I did a 2 drive thing (1 boot drive in the machine, 1 data drive external) many, many years ago (XT 8088 running DOS, then later a Mac Centris 650) mostly so I could take My Stuff (this is before Microsoft ruined the word "My" in the same manner that Apple ruined any use of the letter "i") anywhere and use it on another machine. My question in today's world, specifically with the Mac OS, is how do you accomplish this easily when the Mac OS X is configured by default to compel you to have things reside in certain places (applications want to be in the Applications Folder, etc., often quite sensitive to changing the path). Maybe you just literally put pure data on the 2nd drive and if connecting to another computer you hope that you have the necessary application to make use of the data?

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You are a very wise man -- that's exactly what I've done for years. If the computer crashes big-time, I just grab the data drive, slap it onto a laptop, and at least I can keep working. Backups have saved my bacon many times.

DriveSavers in Novato, CA has had booths at trade shows over the past 10 years, and they posted all kinds of disastrous pictures of massive data loss when drives have burned up, wound up in 20 feet of salt water, run over by cars, etc. One of the best was a signed photo by a bunch of Simpsons producers and writers, who had lost a half-dozen scripts on a crashed drive. DriveSavers recovered them all and saved them weeks of rewriting. Now, they back up.

Note that this kind of data recovery costs thousands of bucks. I think they start at around a couple of grand for a 500GB drive and it goes up from there...

--Marc W.

On a really badly inopportune crash many years ago I called Drive Savers. The price to rescue my drive was "Pentagon Level", absurdly out of scale with the budget of the show. I just had to start over and eat all the time.

phil p

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how do you accomplish this easily when the Mac OS X is configured by default to compel you to have things reside in certain places

Not hard at all. Time Machine backs up your boot drive as well as the external, so all your apps and app prefs / licenses / etc are saved. If you have to move to another machine temporarily, you can grab what you need from the backup. If you have to move permanently, Migration Assistant will move everything at once.

Meanwhile, you build a folder structure for all your data / documents / financials / contact info / etc on the main external (which TM also backs up). Put aliases for those folders on the desktop, or give them shortcuts in something like Butler. And you can put the aliases on the sidebar of finder windows in pace of the default folders.

The only thing you have to remember is to navigate to your main external when saving something. And most apps remember the last folder path, even after a total cold start, so the navigation is there next time.

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Yes, data recover is v-e-r-y expensive. And not at all surprising when you realize what they're doing. Files are stored as "clusters" of data, but clusters aren't stored sequentially on a hard drive... at least, not after the hard drive has been used for a while. It may have started out sequential but it becomes fragmented as files are added and deleted over time and new file data fills the little spaces left over by deleted files. After multiple writes and deletions and writes, the data becomes more and more scattered throughout the drive. During the process of recovering a crashed drive and trying to put all the clusters back together, think of the individual clusters of data on the drive like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle... all the exact same size and shape but with different images on each... and you've lost the cover of the box the puzzle came in. Oh, and there's over a hundred million pieces. Yuh, that'll take some time.

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Not hard at all. Time Machine backs up your boot drive as well as the external, so all your apps and app prefs / licenses / etc are saved. If you have to move to another machine temporarily, you can grab what you need from the backup. If you have to move permanently, Migration Assistant will move everything at once.

Meanwhile, you build a folder structure for all your data / documents / financials / contact info / etc on the main external (which TM also backs up). Put aliases for those folders on the desktop, or give them shortcuts in something like Butler. And you can put the aliases on the sidebar of finder windows in pace of the default folders.

Thanks, Jay, that makes perfect sense now as you lay it out. Time Machine actually helped me out a lot after having to replace the failed (main boot) drive. It actually would have been a totally automatic process if I hadn't stupidly limited (excluded) things for Time Machine to backup (like System Files and some Applications). Now I have set Time Machine to be backing up EVERYTHING so any restore from backup in the future will actually work properly.

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A couple of weeks ago, I had to re-install Snow Leopard on my 6 month old iMac, following recommendations from the Apple technicians (Apple Care was a good idea...) who said format and re-install was the best solution to the problems and behaviour described. It was the very first time I had a problem with OSx, after 7 years with a Mac, mostly on Tiger with a Powerbook G4.

Re-installing was something I was used to with Windows but I never used any back-up/restoring application, just plain simple copy into external drives and then copy back again for documents, and re-installation for all the apps.

It turns out this last time the contents of some folders disappeared, for some reason they were not copied properly out of the old system, just the folder they were in. It wasn´t too tragic but they were work documents, so now I am looking into using Time Machine for the first time.

Is any of you running Time Machine with Pro Tools 9 ? I´ve read AVid doesnt recommend it, but I am not sure if is possible to enable it once a month, for example, back up on an external hd, and then disable it. Would that still be a logical use of Time Machine or does it defeat the purpose of the app?

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<snip>

Re-installing was something I was used to with Windows but I never used any back-up/restoring application, just plain simple copy into external drives and then copy back again for documents, and re-installation for all the apps.

It turns out this last time the contents of some folders disappeared, for some reason they were not copied properly out of the old system, just the folder they were in. It wasn´t too tragic but they were work documents, so now I am looking into using Time Machine for the first time.

For simplicity Time Machine works great.

Using a utility like Carbon Copy Cloner, Super Duper! or the restore function in the Disk Utility app in your utilities folder might prevent this problem if you want to copy the disc as a form of backup again. All three make bootable clones although the method in Disk Utility is a little convoluted and is harder to set up on a regular schedule. Simple copying doesn't copy all the file attributes and data forks necessary for the system to function. The ProTools question is a whole 'nother question, but making bootable clones with CCC or Super Duper! might do the trick.

Best regards,

Jim

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Jim, thanks for that, I will look into those three options.

Regarding Pro Tools, ideally I would do a "Save Copy In" at the end of the day into another HD, and then have a third external where I would, once a month or so, enable and run the app to do a proper back up, but I am not sure to what extent Time Machine interferes with Pro Tools, even if it is not doing anything on the volume PT is installed or recording to.

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My question in today's world, specifically with the Mac OS, is how do you accomplish this easily when the Mac OS X is configured by default to compel you to have things reside in certain places (applications want to be in the Applications Folder, etc., often quite sensitive to changing the path). Maybe you just literally put pure data on the 2nd drive and if connecting to another computer you hope that you have the necessary application to make use of the data?

Yeah, as Jay says above, you basically just have to manually maneuver over to the right drive/directory to open what you need. I still keep all my programs in the Applications folder and all that stuff. I have the "Data Drive" set up with folders named for what they have -- business info, graphics projects, sound projects, video projects, whatever. It actually works OK, and I prefer that to throwing everything in the Documents folder on the boot drive. Think of the Data Drive as just a big "Documents" folder, but on a separate drive.

I cheat by doing this on a Mac Pro with two internal drives, which is convenient -- but if I had a big crash and the computer wouldn't boot, I might have to open it up and pull out the Data Drive, then slap it into an enclosure before I could use it on a separate computer. So far... that hasn't happened. (Knock on wood.)

--Marc W.

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Well, it finally happened... I had a hard drive failure in my 27" iMac. I have been using computers for a very long time and this is a first, for me. I know the phrase regarding drives: "it's not a question if it fails but when" so I guess I have just been incredibly lucky. The good news: drive replaced, no charge (AppleCare) and everything was backed up by TimeMachine. I am now waiting for TimeMachine to do its thing --- close to 900 GB on a 1 TB drive being restored ("About 2 hours and 55 minutes remaining"). Let's hope it all goes well.

Whenever I hear of someone thinking of buying a Mac... I always say get the AppleCare.

I just had an Airport Express AND a Time Capsule replaced inside of a week because I had AppleCare on my iMac.

More than just paid for itself...

Careful with the Time Capsule, Jeff, they have overheating issues and the power supplies burn out.

Best,

Rich

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ON my PC i have NORTON GHOST ( free from Fys every Feb) that copies all 200G to a second drive everynight at 11 pm send me an email that it deleted the older vers ( I keep the last 4) and I sleep well. Of course the music collection is too large to backup. i only have so many terabyte drives. wolf

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  • 4 weeks later...
  • 5 months later...

I just had a hard drive failure of my own making. Not going into detail, it was stupid. I did have Time Machine running so there's that. I was running Leopard when TM was doing the back up. I don't know where the install disk is for it anymore. All I had was Tiger. I put in a new drive and got it partitioned and put on the only os I had available which was Tiger. I've been reading that it wouldn't be a good idea to restore from TM while Tiger is the OS. I do however have a copy of Snow Leopard which I could install to replace Tiger. Does anyone know if I can safely restore from TM (that was created in Leopard) to a new hard drive that would be running Snow Leopard?

Thanks for any helpful advice.

Bernie

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I just had a hard drive failure of my own making. Not going into detail, it was stupid. I did have Time Machine running so there's that. I was running Leopard when TM was doing the back up. I don't know where the install disk is for it anymore. All I had was Tiger. I put in a new drive and got it partitioned and put on the only os I had available which was Tiger. I've been reading that it wouldn't be a good idea to restore from TM while Tiger is the OS. I do however have a copy of Snow Leopard which I could install to replace Tiger. Does anyone know if I can safely restore from TM (that was created in Leopard) to a new hard drive that would be running Snow Leopard?

Thanks for any helpful advice.

Bernie

Got a copy of Leopard. Problem solved...... I hope.

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