I am currently in the process of copying a lot of my data back and forth between my soon to be formatted harddrives. I already formatted my External B (XB) to the journaled format used by Macs, and have finished moving my entire music collection onto my fresh XB. I have since partitioned my drives into a scheme that I think will make much more sense than my previous one.
Note: Skip to after the jump if you don’t feel like reading about why I think it’s generally a better idea to host data externally instead of internally, if you don’t have backups. After the jump, there will be pictures and stuff, and maybe colours. C’mon, pictures and colours. What more do I need to say?!
In words, I would host all my files and documents (i.e. data) on my first of two separate external drives. This is a good idea for anyone who has data that they’d rather never lose (for example, an expansive music library or memorable digital image creations). If these were hosted on an internal drive without extra copies lying around, you better hope your OS never refuses to boot up and that you never get hit (most unfortunately) by a wanton virus. I decided a long time ago that I wouldn’t take such risks with things I could never replace/recreate (such as photographs, yearbook pages, essays, etc…). I could actually stand to have my music collection get wiped by accident. Of course, it would be a hassle to rip all that music again from my CD’s (or find and download them all again), but it’s not completely the end of the world. But the reorganizing part? I’d hate to do that over again.
By putting your important files and folders and running them off of an external drive, you reduce the risk of losing everything since it’s not stored on the same physical disks as your OS. You could just take the HD, explode your computer, and plug the HD back in and run your files and whatnot on a fresh install of your OS. That is not nearly as frustrating as losing data that you know is on the disk but is just inaccessible because Windows (or, dare I say, OS X) dies.
Anyway, that’s why I host my data separately. Up until a few days ago, I had been running all my files from an external always parked next to my computer, and backing that drive up onto another one with SyncToy (for Windows). This was bothersome in more than one way. Firstly, I had partitioned both my externals so that a small chunk would be set aside for TimeMachine backups of my current OS X system. The remaining space were mirrored data libraries of my music and pictures and whatever miscellaneous other bits of files I hang on to.
For someone who is on his OS X a lot more than on his XP (yes, I need Windows to game, but that’s about it), this way of doing things was rather cumbersome. Firstly, the small partitions set up to be TimeMachine backups were too small to backup everything on my OS X system, so I had been excluding some folders which can get very large (like Downloads and Movies) to get it to fit. Secondly, having to boot into Windows everytime I wanted to re-sync/update my files onto my second external was such a hassle that I’d almost never do it. Rest assured, my new scheme is, IMO, much more efficient, and even more effective.
What I’ve got going at the moment is as follows (after hours of copying files over, formatting, and copying them back):
Basically, what I’ve got going is I’ve now got all my data and stuff on my internal HD. It’s big enough for me to have all my music and my photos, and a few of my movies on there and not be crowded at all. I then back up my entire internal drive (via TimeMachine) onto my first external (which magically has enough space for, more or less, my entire OS X partition, even if full). This TimeMachine drive (Clone 1) is then mirrored onto a partition of my second external of the same size (Clone 2). If you’re counting, yes, that will be the third redundant copy of my data in existence. The remaining partition (External) contains a less frequently updated collection of my music, software installs, and then my PSP disk images (which I do not have copied onto anywhere else).
Soon, I will burn these PSP files and stuff onto DVDs or not, if the need to use that extra partition never arises. In any case, the TimeMachine and mirroring processes are all automated so as long as I have my drives plugged in and switched on at around the time the backups kick in, I don’t have to touch anything for my entire computer, applications, data, and all to be backed up. I do think this is a little excessive for the average user, but as someone who has lost his entire music library twice and had tonnes of experiences with mangled metadata from power outages killing my drives, I don’t think it’s such a bad idea.
And that, my friends, has been my nerdgasm of the day.