Post: #1

I am doing music and video production out of a small backpack, with i7 macs, $65 1TB laptop drives (in SM mall in Cebu) , carbon copy, and Crashplan I can produce great quality HD stuff with under $2k worth of equipment.

It is the golden, initial age of true mobility for creatives, much like Hemingway could take a portable typewriter to Paris in the 1920s, we can go anywhere now.

Backup is the bugaboo-- trust your hard drive and organizational ability , spend 200 hours editing your TV pilot, and watch your efforts disappear.

Answer:

https://bombich.com
https://www.code42.com/crashplan/

Here's my editing studio, easily carried in a backpack.

2011 Macbook bought 2 yrs ago used 1600, now worth about 900 but edits HD OK without massive FX.
$10 CDR-King Pelican imitation for my collection of 1TB backup drives and my $100 Thunderbolt dock for Macbook.


I know I'm no cinematographer, but I"m having fun.

Post: #2

Cool. These Macbooks do hold their value. When buying some HP or Dell laptop for lets say 600 euros, you can resell it after 2 years for 150 maybe. Thats 25% of the original value. But if you buy Macbook Pro for 1500 euros, you can probably sell it for like 1000 euros after 2 years which is 66% of the original value. And like you said, even after 4 years you can still get some decent value for it, I guess something like 40% of the original.

Post: #3

(02-21-2015 06:56 AM)evilhei Wrote:  Cool. These Macbooks do hold their value. When buying some HP or Dell laptop for lets say 600 euros, you can resell it after 2 years for 150 maybe. Thats 25% of the original value. But if you buy Macbook Pro for 1500 euros, you can probably sell it for like 1000 euros after 2 years which is 66% of the original value. And like you said, even after 4 years you can still get some decent value for it, I guess something like 40% of the original.

Very true. I recently spelt a water bottle on my macbook pro that i bought in 2010 and the keyboard doesn't work anymore. My roommate who is very tech told me that i can take the laptop apart and sell the individual parts. Will be doing that and putting that money towards my next laptop!

Post: #4

If any of you are novelists, I would warn against backing up *anything* to the cloud. The Cloud is simply a misnomer. It is "somebody else's hard drive" when you get down to it. One you do not own. You rent.

Last year there was an enlightening discussion over at KBoards in the Writer's Cafe. Joe Nobody, a six-figure-a-year author of thrillers lost a hundred thousand word manuscript of his latest novel "in the cloud". He thought he had it backed up. Microsoft Office, I believe.

So anyway he goes to Kmart or Wal-mart (I don't recall which) and some greasy thief breaks into his car and makes off with his laptop.

100,000 words. GONE. He called Microsoft but they could do nothing. It hadn't saved a thing.

Whenever I finish a writing session (I write 1k-2k per day) I always back up to physical media as well as encrypted containers to email (Truecrypt). If it isn't backed up to at least three types of media, it isn't backed up. If you backup only to the cloud, it isn't backed up. Trust me, you don't want to go through losing an entire novel which for most of us is about 3-6 months of brutal work for that length.

Post: #5

An external hard drive is a must have.

I learned the hard way when my macbook crashed earlier this year after installing Yosemite. Everything was backed up to the cloud fortunately. Physical media is just a lot more reliable in my opinion.

Luckily apple fixed the computer and it runs like new now.

Post: #6

You just reminded me to send my important documents and pictures to my flashdrive. Thanks

Post: #7

If i'm writing i just send the word file go my own email adress. Takes two minutes. Backed up forever.

If just loose a 100k words book then thats just stupidity. Who the hell writes that much without multiple backups?

Post: #8

I am not part of the cloud thing yet. But if I am working on a critical file ill do two or three of the following every few hours. It is sort of automatic due to my paranoia. Everything is a cost benefit analysis and I feel a few seconds of effort to preserve hours of work is worth it to me.

1) email it to myself
2) save onto another internal hdd. I work mainly on a desktop so I have a few drives.
3) save to external hd.
4) save it onto a memory stick that is always plugged into pc

My crucial files are never over a few mb. What ike is doing is probably many gigs at a time because of the nature of video files. I appreciate him raising this topic.

Post: #9

Just bear in mind that spinning platter hard drives can sometimes up and die without any warning (I cringed when I saw the Toshiba label--too many bad experiences with those). If you are dealing with something critical, a backup of the backup wouldn't be a bad idea. I was going to suggest SSD hard drives, but you probably have a shitload of data you are working with, which would make the SSD option a tad pricey.

Post: #10

Alpha Romeo I have read about that. I have a 2 TB Western digital external Hd and was planning to rip all of my dvds and store them on there just to get rid of DVD cases but am worried about it failing on me out of no where. From my understanding, every Hd eventually fails just like every piece of electronic merchandise and there's no way to predict it. Maybe I'm better off getting a nicer HD??

Post: #11

(02-22-2015 09:37 AM)Brian Shima Wrote:  Alpha Romeo I have read about that. I have a 2 TB Western digital external Hd and was planning to rip all of my dvds and store them on there just to get rid of DVD cases but am worried about it failing on me out of no where. From my understanding, every Hd eventually fails just like every piece of electronic merchandise and there's no way to predict it. Maybe I'm better off getting a nicer HD??

Or just another external HDD with the same capacity and use it to "mirror" what is stored on the first drive. Actually mirroring (making an exact copy on another drive) is a basic technology that can be employed on servers that ensures that data is still fully intact even when one of the HDDs up and dies. Of course, from a performance perspective it's lousy. But if you have critical data to back up and cash to splash, I would suggest getting 2 HDDs and storing them in separate locations. If you're on the road like the OP, then 1 HDD *and* backing up to a cloud-based option might be more practical.

Post: #12

I have a hate relationship with external drives. I lost a lot of good stuff when two of mine went bad. One bad drop, it could be toast. If it is something that is crucial, you should be backing it up in multiple of places. I do my projects on the cloud and on external drives besides my main computer.

Post: #13

I backup to the cloud and then quarterly back my stuff up to another external HD thats stored in another location thats not my home or office. Are you guys saying I need ANOTHER layer of redundancy?

Post: #14

(02-21-2015 02:15 PM)Spike Wrote:  If i'm writing i just send the word file go my own email adress. Takes two minutes. Backed up forever.

If just loose a 100k words book then thats just stupidity. Who the hell writes that much without multiple backups?

I want to agree with above poster that you really should have THREE backup methods in your system, I do but did not mention the third which is not very organized.

It's not that hard to lose all your stuff -- it just takes one or two common mistakes:

1) Not having off-site backup. If your computer and hard drives are stolen or destroyed in a fire or earthquake-- end of story. Leaving a backup hard drive at a friend's house or safe deposit box if you have money are ways to do it.

2) Having only one backup. What's common in that case is your work file gets corrupted and you back up, but what you do is unintentionally over-write your latest backup with shit.
Now you have shit as your backup, and shit as your work file.

3) Not test-restoring your backup, as the 100,000 word loss above reflects. He probably didn't set up his backup settings right, or Microsoft's stuff was buggy and too hard to use.

One test I do is take my work file off line, and try to re-open the project from the backup. You've got to test that the backup actually contains a usable coopy.

I trust Crashplan from Minnesota more than Microsoft, backup is their only business and they claim Apple as one of their customers.

Also, I've already lost files on my machine, searched for them on Crashplan's servers and found them, saving me work.

They may not be perfect, but they are a hell of a lot more well-situated in a Minneapolis server building than me to insure things are kept protected and restorable than I am in my month-to-month apartment in Cebu.

With video, it also can take weeks or even months before the files gradually are backed up to their servers with online backup. It is a last-resort, long-term resource.

Post: #15

(02-21-2015 01:09 PM)Soothesayer Wrote:  If any of you are novelists, I would warn against backing up *anything* to the cloud. The Cloud is simply a misnomer. It is "somebody else's hard drive" when you get down to it. One you do not own. You rent.

I agree on not making cloud your exclusive backup, but it is for me a good secondary backup. ( I wouldn't deal with Microsoft unless I was a huge corporation who actually meant something to them)

It is "someone else's" hard drive, but Crashplan
has professional backup people who maintain serious servers in secure, controlled environments. I am not a professional server tech, I don't have any secure locations, and I spot check my files on their servers so it's not pure chance whether it's there .

It's $60 per year for unlimited space (now.) I don't profit from their business.

One good feature of this type of backup is I forget that I have stuff, old hard drives get discarded and I lose stuff.

As long as I have it in cloud, sometimes when I lose something from 4 years ago it's still maybe there. I can't carry around 20 hard drives and renting storage space is minumum $50 per month in USA. Hard drives left there will age quickly due to temperature change.

Post: #16

(02-22-2015 08:16 PM)Dr. Howard Wrote:  I backup to the cloud and then quarterly back my stuff up to another external HD thats stored in another location thats not my home or office. Are you guys saying I need ANOTHER layer of redundancy?

I wouldn't think you needed anything more than what you are already doing. Sounds about the same as what I am doing. Just as long as you have copies off location which you said you do.

I also take it a step further. Especially when uploading to the cloud. I zip up my files (sometimes in several zip files since they are big) and password protect them.

Post: #17

Unless you're regularly spinning them up and testing them, hard drives are a TERRIBLE way to keep your data safe.

In addition to having a 2nd site to store the data you should use a different media as well. Mine of choice right now is the LTO data tapes used by big companies. They are reliable and have 20+ year shelf lives. I purchased a Dell PowerVault from the local surplus place for about $30 and it's connected to my server via SCSI. A PV is a tape library, which holds up to 20 tapes that store 200 GB each (I'm using fairly old LTO-2 technology) for a total of 4,000 GB I can backup at a time without changing out tapes. If you have a single drive it can be a pain in the ass, but newer LTO generations hold a lot more per tape so it's less of a headache.

Also LTO-2 tapes cost me about $8 each new.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_Tape-Open

IKE, I love that case, where can you buy them?

Post: #18

Hey guys,

So for a consulting business I help run I have about 300 clients and their contact information and business plans I help them with stored on the google cloud system in google docs. Once per month I back up all the google doc files on a USB drive- is this enough? What would you guys do? Thanks

Post: #19

Speak of the devil! My PC had a meltdown today and I am currently restoring the backup.

Post: #20

I had 1.5TB of pictures and GoPro videos from my motorcycle travels all over the US, as well as some fun off road enduro stuff I did. I recently lost all of it because the drive suddenly died.

Since then I have set up a RAID 1 (2 4TB drives that are mirrored) server for my home using FreeNAS. It is set up to be my personal cloud, as well as hosting for my movies and TV shows using PLEX.

Now if one of the drives goes down I still have a copy on the other drive. And for the really important stuff I have a USB HDD that I use for extra redundancy.