Drobo and Time Machine.. a match made on the Mac.

Time Machine... I love it. It backs everything up, keeps it organized by hour, day, week, month. It's great. The best thing is that I don't have to do anything to keep Time Machine working... uh, except for keeping a hard drive plugged into the computer that has enough room on it for all those backups.

This probably isn't an issue for many Mac users, unless they compulsively save every Youtube video they find online or take part in some other hard drive filling hobbies. For me, it is photos... which is what pays the bills. So at any given time, my basic MacPro backup is anywhere from 100-125gb depending (this is apps, music, and everything but photos) and then my photo drive is another 200-300gb depending (these are transmits and raw takes that have not been edited and moved into my archiving system yet.)

So that first Time Machine backup is about 400gb. Figure I'm using a 750gb drive and right there, I have filled 1/2 of the drive (roughly... I know that math is not one of my strengths). And from there I am able to fill the Time Machine drive up with amazing speed.

Each time I come back from a week long overseas shoot with 50-60gb of raw files... slurp... there goes another chunk of the drive... and you do that three or four times, along with the normal day to day backups and you have managed to fill up a 750gb drive in less than two months.

So then you go buy another hard drive (because I want to have a lasting backup system so that if I need to go back more than two months if I need to) and you start the process over again. First, it creates the giant backup that takes up a large chunk of the drive and then you watch the remaining space get smaller and smaller until it is time to repeat the process again.

Eventually you end up with a whole lot of drives and a bit of a headache from a backup/redundancy standpoint because in the unfortunate circumstance you need to go back to a backup to find something (and it happens... believe me) you then have to remember which disk (which two month chunk of time) the file or files are stored on.

This is when I decided to take the plunge and try the Drobo. I had always thought the Drobo systems were pretty cool. If you don't know what a Drobo is, it is a RAID array that runs its self. You just have to put in up to four SATA drives (any size you want, they don't have to match) and plug it in to the firewire or usb port on your computer and it will do its thing from there.

It seemed like a perfect solution (you put a few 750gb drives in there and it'll last a long time since you won't have to keep re-doing that initial backup). Initially I was a bit concerned and kept going back to look at the backups and make sure that it was working and there weren't errors or problems... and there weren't. The Drobo was rock solid. The Mac would hang and I had to force it to restart, it would restart and Drobo was right there ready to work... unfazed by the shutdown.

One of the complaints that has floated around about the Drobo is that it is slow... when it was USB only, that might have been true, (I never tried the first version that was only USB) but the firewire 800 version is plenty fast. If I was editing video or doing something else that required lots and lots of extreme bandwidth, maybe I wouldn't be as happy. For Time Machine and the drive works great and is plenty fast.

The other thing that made Drobo attractive is that it is redundant backup. If one of the drives craps out in the array, you replace the drive and the Drobo will get you right back up to speed... with no data loss. Nothing nicer than having backups of your backups. Remember... redundancy. Drobo uses part of each drive to backup the other drives in the array automatically. It does all of this by its self. You don't have to do anything other that put data on it.

Here is another reason why redundancy is good. Before trying the Drobo, I tried using one of the Maxtor 2 terabyte drives (follow the link only so you know what NEVER to buy... there is a reason they are always on sale) and found out the hard way that when one of those drives fail (and it is two 1TB drives in an enclosure with a very cheap built in hardware raid solution) you have to send the whole thing back to Seagate and they send you a brand new drive and your data is gone. In my case, the drive shut down all of a sudden with about 500gb of data and would not mount again no matter what I did.

And when your data is gone, you might ask ... gone where? Good question. One they were not able to answer. They promised that they erase everything that comes back as a return, but were unable to answer the question of how many times they write over the data, etc. Plus, if you were counting on that backup... its gone. All of it. They ship you a new drive in a box and will not make any attempt to recover your data.

So with the Drobo it is fast, redundant, quiet and as simple to use as a regular external hard drive. It is the perfect Time Machine (or other backup progam) solution, in my opinion. If a drive fails, you replace the drive. It does not require sending anything back to Drobo unless the actual device fails, but from what I have seen, they are very reliable.

And then I started to compare the Drobo to my existing RAID system...

SuperDuper is Leopard compatible

My favorite backup app in the entire world... no wait... the entire universe is now Leopard compatible. You would think that between family (especially with twins babies- Charlotte (L) and David) and work and church and ASMP other commitments I wouldn't have time to obsess over a backup program... but I make time for the important things ;-)

SuperDuper is now Leopard compatible. If you don't use it... buy it now and start using it. It is the best bootable backup solution for the Mac.

Grouchy Mac? Don't panic!

This is for the Mac that boots up successfully but acts weird after that.

Every Mac gets weird once in while. But when it happens don't freak out. Applications not opening, the spinning beach ball, sudden loss of your otherwise stable internet connections, or an application just bounces away on the dock and never opens up are usually things that can be fixed easily.

First thing to do... restart. Doing nothing more than restarting will solve 80% of the "all of a sudden my Mac is acting weird" problems. Unlike a PC, restarting your Mac can work magic. I never shut down my desktop computer, and rarely shut down my laptops, preferring to have them sleep so I can wake them up and go to work... this is good, but allowing the computer to restart and reload the OS can sometimes fix little bugs that seem to creep in if your Mac has not been restarted for awhile.

If your Mac doesn't seem to be responding to the command to shut down or restart (which is located under the Apple in the menu bar at the top left of your screen) then you can hold down the power button for 2-3 seconds and it will force your Mac to shut down (this works for all Macs, desktops, laptops, cubes and mini's... both Intel and PPC.) Wait 10 or 15 seconds and then hit the power button and your Mac will start back up.

If you restart and things are still not behaving the way they should, get to your "Applications" folder and then open up your "Utilities" folder. Find the application called "Disk Utility" and double click it. You should select your main hard drive on the column on the left and then select the "First Aid" tab on the right. Then click on "Repair Disk Permissions" towards the bottom of the window.

After the computer completes this (and it might take awhile so don't worry if it seems to be going very slowly) click the "Verify Disk Permissions" button and you should not see repeats of any of the errors that the computer found and hopefully fixed when you told it to "repair."

If there are still errors (usually in red) that Disk Utility couldn't fix, copy the name of the error and do a Google search on the name of the error and put "os x" after it and if it is common, you should be able to find the fix for whatever the problem is.

Something else to consider when problems start appearing... have you added any software, hardware, memory or anything else to the computer right before the problem started? If so, try uninstalling or unplugging that latest addition to see if the problem goes away.

If repairing permissions doesn't solve the problem consider Onyx made by Titanium Software, a tool no wise Mac user will be without. It is free but one of the best all around utility programs to fix your ailing Mac. If your problems aren't solved by the fixes above, you should definitely try Onyx. When you open Onyx it will want to verify S.M.A.R.T. status of your hard drive and verify the startup volume (which will quit all other applications running on your machine) You do not want to skip this steps. It can alert you to problems and let you know if your problem could be hard drive related instead of software related.

If Onyx tells you that there are issues with the disk and it needs to be repaired, you should restart your computer and boot from your install DVD for whichever OS you are using (10.4 or 10.5) and run the disk utility when booted from the DVD to repair the drive.

Disk Utility can't repair a drive when it is the drive you are running your Mac from, so you have to start from another drive (or DVD) to fix your main hard drive. Here are the instructions on how to do it.

Once your disk is repaired, you can restart like normal and there is a good chance your problem is fixed. Disk errors can cause all sorts of glitches.

If not, reopen Onyx and go to the "Automation" tab, click all the check boxes...yes, everything and then click "Execute."

Doing this is sort of the computer version of the broad spectrum antibiotic. It will clean and zap all sorts of stuff in your system (non-destructive to your data) that can become corrupt and hopefully you will have a happy Mac after that.

If you are still having problems with specific applications (not with the system as a whole) check to see if there are any updates for the program. Many apps now have the ability to check for updates automatically when you start them up, but either way, go to the software maker's site and look for any updates or look in their support area to see if there are fixes for your specific problem.

You can also do a Google search for the name of the application and a description of the problem and add "OS X" to the end for good measure. Something like "Photoshop CS3 crop tool broken OS X" (the problem I am having that I posted about previously.) The other good reason to do this is because it is rare that you are the only person experiencing whatever problem that is occurring. By doing a search, you will find out that you aren't alone and hopefully stumble upon a fix along the way.

If your problem is with a specific application, the next thing to try would be deleting and reinstalling that piece of software to see if that makes things better. The way I like to do this is with AppZapper. It cleanly gets rid of the application and the support files and preferences. It also makes a cool Captain Kirk "Zap" phaser noise as it sends your no-longer-needed app to the trash. As cool as AppZapper is, however, you still have to reinstall the software the old fashioned way... it's only good at getting rid of apps, not reinstalling them.

If problems continue and repairing permissions, cleaning things out using Onyx, searching for the problem you are having yielded no results, and reinstalling the offending software didn't help, I would try doing a clean install of your system and reinstall everything. (Or just restore your computer from your backups... you backup, right??)

While reinstalling everything can be time consuming, in the long run it will usually save you some time. I can have all my critical software reinstalled on a computer in about three hours when I reinstall from the disks... yet troubleshooting obscure problems can consume the best Mac sleuths for days. After doing the steps above, you are usually better off just starting over then remaining in a semi-crippled mode with your computer and hoping and firing blindly for a fix.

If you are absolutely opposed to doing a clean reinstall, the other thing to try would be taking your offending Mac to the Apple Store or give Apple support a call place to see what they can do. If you take it to the Apple Store and they decide there is a problem and that they want to take in your computer for repair, make sure you have all your data backed up... they are fond of wiping hard drives and doing clean OS installs... and for good reason.

The only other thing to consider... there are times where bad RAM or other hardware issues can cause what seem like random corruption, and if this is the case with your Mac, it's probably best left to Apple to help you ferret out where that problem lies.

Backing up Your Mac - Long Term Archiving

In addition to daily backups to protect work in progress, you should also be doing long term archiving of all your images and critical files. Unlike daily backups where you can access your backed up data quickly because it is plugged in to your computer, if you don't break your backups up, your backup system can be unwieldy if you are making it search and update 2TB of data every day.

How often you should perform long term archiving depends upon how many photos you shoot and how much space you are taking up on your hard drives.

I tend do to do archiving once a month. Doing it monthly keeps the number of images manageable and while I am archiving, I also compile everything for quarterly copyright sumbisison. I look through the images, delete anything that there is no use for (out of focus, mis-fires, etc.) and I burn everything else (from the raw shoots) to two DVD's (two copies of the same images.)

I also use a program called CD Finder to catalog all of the DVD's that I've burned so that I can search for photos using the database it builds. It is just another way to keep track of images.

One set of DVD's is stored on-site in my office closet in an acid-free box designed for the storage of CD's and DVD's. The other set of DVD's is stored off-site in a similar set of boxes. Both sets are stored in a cool, dark and dry location that isn't prone to big shifts in temperature or humidity.

After I burn the two DVD's, I move the files over to a hard drive that is only used for archiving. At the end of the year, I duplicate the hard drive (two copies of the same data) and put one hard drive in my safe deposit box at my bank, and the other with my off-site set of DVD's.

At the end of the year, I also burn DVD's and copy to the hard drive(s) all of my published images from the year, clips, copies of everything submitted for copyright (and copies of the submitted thumbnails) and anything else photo related that would fall within the year.

I reason I archive to hard drives as well as DVD's is because it is much easier to manage the data on a hard drive. If all of the data on my RAID got corrupted, it would be much easier to restore it from a few hard drive than from hundreds of DVD's that would have to be read one at a time.

The reason I archive to DVD's is because they are cost effective and allow me to do incremental archiving of images in smaller batches that I can then move to my off-site more quickly instead of waiting until the end of the year to distribute my backups.

There is still some debate about the lifetime of DVD's. If you burn quality disks, and verify the data, you should be in good shape. Most disks that go "bad" are bad because of scratches or they were left in the sun, or some other environmental cause.

You should store your archive DVD's in good hard cases (DVD's can get scratched in those cheap little paper sleeves) and use CD safe pens to write on them. You should store them in some sort of container designed for storing disks and keep them in a dry, dark, cool place. This will help extend the life considerably.

I figure that before I get close to the lifespan of a DVD, we will be archiving on something with 10 times the capacity... look at the transition from CD's to DVD's. So I am not fretting over the lifetime of the DVD's.

I would also advise that you not store your original files and all of your backups in the same place. Living in San Diego, wildfires are a constant threat, and there were a number of photographers that not only suffered the loss of their homes during the fires, but also lost all their photos and backups because they were all stored on-site. Spread your backups out so that if something catastrophic happens, you have other backups to rely on that are kept in other places.

You can even partner with another photographer to keep a copy of their backups and in exchange they store a copy of your backups.

The other thing that I use (and really love) as part of my archiving strategy is an external RAID where I also store every digital photo I've ever shot and all of my scanned film images, too. I use a Firmtek 4 bay RAID which I've been really happy with. I have 750GB drives in mine, and I am not sure I could live without it now.

The ability to have instant access to every image I've ever shot without even getting up from my chair is awesome. It has saved me hours of time that I used to spend pulling archived DVD's, getting the images off of them and then refiling them every time I had a photo request from a client. Using a RAID also reduces the risk of damaging your archive DVD's. Since the RAID is plugged into your computer, Spotlight catalogs the disks which makes it really easy to search for images.

Another advantage of using a RAID is that you can mirror the drives. Just like the name implies, one drives is a mirror image of the other. When you add or subtract files, those changes are made on both drives at the same time. When one of the drives in the mirror fails, you can pop in a new drive and the RAID will copy all the data back over to the new drive and you have no down time.

I use SoftRAID to run my Firmtek box (vs. Apple's built in RAID control.) It gives me more flexibility in how I set things up, and also gives you warnings if there are any problems with the disks in the RAID.

RAID is not a replacement for good archival backups, however. The problem with using a RAID is that if the data becomes corrupt or gets deleted, that change will be on both the original disk and the mirror (since they are the same) so having other good backups is critical. The mirroring is only protection against hardware failure, not data corruption.

Now is a great time to come up with your own archiving plan and start backing things up.

Backing up Your Mac - Short Term Backups

Backing up your Mac is important. Hard drives fail, software can mess stuff up, or a rogue four-year-old can go from playing Reader Rabbit to putting desktop files in the trash and emptying it because the unnamed child liked the satisfying sound the computer made as they trashed each file.

No matter how it happens, data loss can range from being a simple annoyance to a very expensive business-altering-disaster depending upon how well your data is backed up.

And there are a lot of people that don't back up. Some are lucky and haven't had a problem...yet. But it is not a question of will you suffer a data loss at some point, it is just a question of when.

One thing that proves that point is the number of companies that exist to recover failed hard drives. Here is a Google search on "Hard Drive Recovery." The reason there are that many companies in business is because there are a lot of people who suddenly discover their data is hosed and don't have any backups so they have no choice but to shell out to try to save their data.

Most of these companies are reputable and do good work, but you can expect to pay thousands of dollars to recover your hard drive and depending upon why it failed you could get all of your data back as one giant folder with all the files contained on the drive. You then get to spend days figuring out what they are and where they go. Or you could end up with little or nothing off the bad drive like this poor guy's experience. Needless to say, it could be a really bad and expensive situation.

Now if you really like to live dangerously, you can try what this guy did and rebuild the drive hardware, but it's not something I would suggest.

So if you aren't actively backing up, the first thing that you need to figure what data should be backed up. Things that usually fall into this category should include your photos (duh), invoicing, documents, estimates, contacts, calendars, bookkeeping, software installers and serial number, music, movies, passwords, and anything else that you would be lost without. Many of these items reside in your User folder, but double check that things aren't parked in other parts of your hard drive(s) that should be backed up.

There are two types of backup you need to think about; short-term and long-term.

Your short-term backups are for day to day backup of files that you use all the time and things that are important. If they stop working or disappear, you can go back to the version from yesterday, or the days prior and get back to a working copy of the file. Programs like Backup (for 10.4 or 10.5 users) and Time Machine (for 10.5 users) are best for this type of backup.

If you are on a desktop Mac, you can designate on of your other internal drives* as a backup. I prefer using an external drive so that if that machine dies, you can unplug the external drive and plug it into another Mac, and immediately recover the data you need until your main Mac is fixed.

One thing you never want to do is use your main (boot) drive or any partitions on it for backups. If you do that and the drive fails, there go your files and your backups. The same goes for any other drive that has critical info on it. You want the backup on a separate drive from where your originals are stored.

With Apple's Backup, you have to do a little work to decide what you want backed up and how often you want it backed up, but once you've done that it pretty much will run automatically in the background at the scheduled times. I like to have Backup run early in the morning (like 2am) when I am most likely not sitting at my computer, but I also set my computer to never go to sleep. If you have your computer sleep when you aren't using it and this happens during a scheduled backup time, it will run the scheduled backup next time your Mac is awake.

When the drive is full it will stop backing up and let you know that you need to replace the drive or erase it and start over. External hard drives are inexpensive enough that I would strongly suggest buying another drive, unplug the old one, label the dates archived on it, plug in the new one and safely store the old one just in case you ever need any of the data on it.

With Time Machine, you just tell the computer which drives you want backed up and it will do hourly backups to make sure everything is where it is supposed to be. After a few days it condenses things to one backup per day, and if you go back a month or two, it condenses them weekly. The idea being that most likely if you lose something, you will know it pretty quickly and be able to recover the most recent version of the missing file(s) but if you are going back weeks, it is probably a file that is not being updated frequently anyways.

One thing that Time Machine will eventually do if you are not careful is start delete your oldest backups when the backup hard drive gets full. Before it gets full, I suggest replacing it with a new drive and store the old one after labeling it with the dates archived on it... just in case.

Another type of backup that can be a good idea is a network backup. The easiest way is through Backup and your .Mac account. Due to space and network limitations, I only back up things like invoices and other must-have files that I would be really sunk without, but if my office burned down, I would have the data available to start rebuilding things.

But please, please, please back up your Mac. Stop reading and do it now! Well, you can finish this post, first, I suppose. There is only one paragraph left.

A good external hard drive can be bought for around $100 and Backup is free if you have a .Mac account. Time Machine is free if you have 10.5 installed on your computer. There is really no good reason to not back up, but there are plenty of reasons for regret if you don't.

I am liking Leopard

I am now running Leopard on all three of my work Macs. Currently, that would be a Mac Pro 2.66 quadcore, a 17" MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2.33, and a black MacBook Core 2 Duo 2ghz. It has been quite stable and I am not experiencing any real serious issues with it.

My main pet peeves are that I can't get my HP Officejet 7310 duplexing printer to duplex any more and that I have a few little odd files in the trash that won't go away on the Mac Pro (but this problem hasn't shown up on either laptop.)

I understand that there is actually a fix for the files in the trash thing that has something to do with the windows partition... maybe (I am running Boot Camp, but I haven't taken the time to research it since the only thing that happens is that it shows that the trash is perpetually not empty. The things like holding down "Option" while emptying the trash or using SuperGetInfo to make the files go away hasn't worked. If you do a get info on them, try to rename them, or try to drag them to the desktop, they just disappear... and then magically re-appear in the trash again. (I'm writing an awful lot about a problem I haven't really tried to fix, huh?)

Another thing that I am really, really, missing is the ability to use Shirt Pocket Sofware's SuperDuper to back up my laptops. It has been my nearly perfect tool for backing up the MacBook and MacBook Pro to external portable firewire drives so that I have a bootable backup ready to go if something goes amiss in the field while on a shoot. The thing I love about SuperDuper is that it is simple and after you do the initial backup, you have the option to do smart backups so that it is only updating what has changed since the last time you backed up... it doesn't copy everything all over again. It will also make the copy bootable so that you can plug it in and boot from the external drive if necessary (it does need to be a firewire drive for this feature.) They are furiously working on a Leopard (10.5) compatible version and neither I nor my Macs can wait!

What I am liking about Leopard is that it is fast, has some cool new tweaks, and is no less reliable than Tiger (10.4).

What I'm really digging right now is Time Machine. Under Tiger, I used Apple's Backup program (which is free if you have a .Mac account - another good idea... but we'll get to that another time.) for daily archival backups to an external drive and then would do a full bootable backup of the system using SuperDuper every few weeks.

On my desktop system, I care more about my data (address books, photos, invoicing, receipts, passwords) being backed up than keeping the machine instantly re-bootable if there is a hard drive or software issue. After all, if I am sitting in the office, I have both laptops and all the install CD's to re-install everything anyways. So I can always pull the backup off the external and run things off a laptop if I need to. But Backup was always slow and I would set it to run at 2:30am so that it wouldn't choke whatever else I was doing... plus there were occasionally issues with programs like Mail if you were using them when Backup started running where the backup could fail when you went to recover it.

I have found that Time Machine is fast and seems to use disk space very efficiently (in the time I have been using it.) I have recovered files from it and found that it recovered thing much more quickly than Backup ever did. Part of this could also be attributed to the fact that I don't have weeks and weeks of backups stacked on the drive yet. I would imagine that the performance could decline some over time as there are more backups it will have to sort through to pull out the right data. From my experiments, it doesn't seem to matter to Time Machine. It seems to make good backups of things even while you are using them, or at least must have the sense to avoid backing up the things that could cause problems down the road.

More about Leopard later...