Mark - you can use a WHS server as your TimeMachine backup drive. I have a HP Home Server that I’ve used for several years (and which I have resisted upgrading) because the “DriveExtender” feature of WHS 2007 is so user-friendly. WHS will guide you through the set up process. YOu can find the instructions in the WHS Control Panel.

Luke

I use Time Machine (saved to an external FW800 drive) on my main work station with an hourly update schedule. Then, nightly I perform a scheduled backup using Carbon Copy Cloner … and another drive kept off site is updated weekly with an auto setting in CCC that it backs up automatically every time the drive is attached to the workstation … both of the latter drives are connected via a drive dock from OWC (combo USB/FW800/eSATA dock)

Why do I do both TM and cloned backups? … you can boot up a workstation from a cloned backup drive and continue working in a pinch … not so much with TM

All my image files reside on two four-bay trayless external FW800 towers … each have four 2TB drives … the first tower is working files, the second tower is the first backup, then I also keep four drives off-site that are backed up weekly, or after a large job, whichever comes first … again by using the “when mounted” backup preference in CCC …

I store the off-site drives in Weibetech Drive boxes (think old VCR containers fitted to 3.5” drives) and place them in a padded Pelican case for easy transport.

I only use a single backup clone for my laptop because any work accomplished on that is moved to the main workstation upon return to the office … and Time Machine is of little use when working outside the office so I don’t use it for the MBP.

I’m thinking about upgrading the bridgeboards in my external drive towers to eSATA when I upgrade to a Thunderbolt capable iMac since LaCie introduced the Thunderbolt eSATA hub last week ($200) … since there doesn’t seem to be readily available Thunderbolt bridgeboards … that should speed up throughput to the towers quite a bit …

I have a very similar system to Butch, though some time ago, I switched to a wired backup over ethernet to a Mac Mini with connected drives, which lives in an armoured/fire-proof safe in the basement, I had to switch from CCC to Chronosync. CCC claims a bug in HFS+ handling (filename and permissions) makes backups over LAN fail, but Chronosync handles it fine. Both are excellent products though.

I use the same drive dock as Butch too. An old Mini is a much better solution for backups than a NAS for Mac users. Pick one up on eBay for little cash, but make sure it’s post PPC, because the earlier ones only had 10/100 ethernet (as fast as an ‘n’ wifi though! Remember too that gigabit wired on a clean network is as fast/faster than FW800.) The Mini can easily be run headless from any Mac running 10.5 or later, via built-in Screen Sharing. Hell … I even use my iPhone to manage the home network, via screen-sharing. The Mini also has excellent power management, produces very little heat and is almost silent. It handles the waking and sleeping of attached drives extremely well and all in all is a … well it’s a Mac. It’s what you’d expect.

We also have TimeMachine backups running. These run wireless to the Mini in the same safe in the basement, to 2 separate attached FW drives. If you’re paranoid, these could easily be mirrored in case of drive failure, but I personally would call that overkill.

TimeMachine is a total no-brainer for anyone running a Mac. It can just run in the background and you forget it. But the really neat thing with TimeMachine, is … say you accidentally delete a contact from your Contacts. With Contacts open, go back in time in TimeMachine, using Spotlight (in TimeMachine) to search for the contact, then just ‘restore’ that contact. It’s so well done. You don’t have to take your entire Contacts file back to that date. You restore just what you want. We run TimeMachine wirelessly to our headless Mini (which is also wired) but if you don’t have that setup and already have an Airport Extreme, then you can make it work with that, but it’s less straightforward. Multiple drives and power over usb being a problem. I’m not sure how the Time Capsule handles that.

Joseph,

I’ve seen off the shelf fireproof hard drives such as this one: www.klsecurity.com/disaster_ready_drive_iosafe.htm

And here’s a roll your own article:
www.networkgarage.com/2005/10/fireproof_safe_backup_1.html

I haven’t tried either one.

Joseph,

funnily enough, I started to describe how I get the cables in, in my last post, then I thought … shit this is getting really geeky … you need help. So I deleted that part. :) :)

Fireproof means a LOT of heat. There are two holes in the floor of the cabinet and I guess they are there to allow the release of pressure … and also to allow the release of pressure from flooding too. The floor of the inside of the cabinet is raised about 2cm off the floor of the room. The exterior goes all the way down to the floor, but I raised the hole thing on a couple of strips of wood, by about 1cm. So I can get a 13 amp mains cable (extension with plugs) in one of the holes and an ethernet in the other. Works fine.

My solution is really simple. I have an disk called Archive to store my files such as applicaties en files for longterm storage. My iMac and Archive disk are back upped using TimeMachine. My most important files such as my photo’s, movies and documents are stored on a separate disk (the second backup) and save in a locker of the bank. Every month I change the disk with a updated version. So for the bank I have two disks for my most important files.

Joseph
I was wondering If you have 4 tb drive access for backups, why you choose to used referenced instead of managed. Im about to move my daughter to Aperture from IPhoto 9 and add two, 2 tb external drives to her iMac one 2 tb for here working Aperture Managed library and the other 2 tb for her Aperture vault. Since the Managed Library dose not add to much of file size. Is there a reason I should look at not doing it this way and doing referenced.
Her current iPhoto library is 238 GB’s, so I have to move it off her iMac drive of 320 GB’s. So I thought a 2 TB should hold her a few years more.

Joseph
Thank you for your response. My daughters is 37 and a busy mom that takes at least a couple dozen photos a day of here growing children. So approx 700 to a 1000 photos a month. And mom dose not like to delete any of them good or bad. Her iphone fills fast. Thus the move to Aperture 3. So she will have the ease of the auto dump to a monthly folder of her photo stream, when she opens Aperture, thus allowing her to keep her iphone unclogged. And also the vault back up. She will be receiving a Christmas gift this year of BackBlaze subscription. So external Libray, external Vault and Backblaze will be her routine. Thanks again, Your sight is a great resource.

Joseph,

I have a 2 internal drive setup in my MBPro. I never miss the DVD drive, but OWC and others offer an ext. casing should you ever need it.

The first thing you need to look at for SSD, is the Serial-ATA info for your iMac, which you will find in the System Report (Apple Menu / About This Mac).

You will see Link Speed and Negotiated Link Speed. If these do not have *6 gigabit*, then you will be wasting your money buying a top-of-the-line SSD, because it will not be able to run at full speed, only at 3 gigabit.

I think the best way to get the most bang for buck for an Aperture system is to first max out the RAM, then have an SSD drive for startup and general docs/email/web etc. For this I would put in a 250gb and partition it to 2 partitions/drives. A 60-80gb or so for the system and the remainder for files. (60-100gb for the system should be plenty if you keep your system reasonably lean). I would put this drive in the DVD caddie. Then the real crux come with the price/performance equation of an SSD Aperture drive. Ideally we can just dump everything in one place, but as we know, that is not really possible. One of the major considerations for Aperture speed/integrity is that it be written contiguously. So having it on its own drive is really helpful, because it becomes trivial to keep it contiguous. Keeping the Aperture library contiguous also reduces the likelihood of corruption.

Personally, I find that I can keep my internal drive as a managed drive, by only retaining the ‘keepers’ on this drive. So this is what I do … When I’m working on a job, it is in this internal managed Library. When I finish, I export the Project as a Library to my archive drive which has the usual Finder structure for client folders etc. If I already have a Library for this client I merge the new into the old. This drive is mirror backed up to a second ‘failsafe’ drive. I take it upon myself not to fuck up. It is a good way of focussing the mind having a mirror drive system (although I do have my backup software ‘archive’ prior to trashing. I empty this archive manually every month or so).

Now back on my internal Aperture drive/library, I trash all the images from the job, that are not ‘keepers’, or potentially useful. This generally means everything below 4 stars for me. The result is that I’m able to keep an internal managed library for Aperture, which has all the ‘delivered’ work on it. It’s amazing how small this can be.

Of course, every time you trash a lot of files from Aperture, you introduce the possibility that new files may be written non-contiguously, so formatting this drive every so often, then putting a copy of the Aperture library back on it, will ensure that it remains ‘optimised’. Smaller libraries are also less prone to problems, so contiguous + small is good. It’s so easy to switch Libraries since Ap3, that this is quite a feasible solution for many.

Grant