Best backup options for iMac?

May 6, 2009 2:49 PM

iMacFilter: Recommend a good external drive?

I have an iMac G5 networked with an iBook G4. Memory on both has been getting a little tight.

I'm looking for two things:

1- a place to backup & store files from both computers

2- a drive that could host & stream my music to both computers to help free up memory on both

Is there a kind of external drive that would serve both these purposes? Or should I be looking to get two separate drives? Or am I going about this all the wrong way? Maybe there's an alternate setup that would work?

Tips on good automated backup software &/or software for streaming music from external drives for iMacs are also most welcome...

Thanks!

posted by jammy to computers & internet (18 comments total)

You mean storage, not memory, but that's sort of an esoteric difference if you get deep enough down, I suppose.

Any external USB drive will work. I would leave it connected to the G5, assuming that is powered on all the time, and then mount/share it from the iBook as needed. If you use iTunes, it will already stream/share music to your other Macs.

A 1Tb external drive (1,000Gb, give or take) should be a hundred and something dollars these days. For best Mac feel-good support, I'd choose LaCie (they like Macs), but really any old drive will do. I use two WD MyBook 1Gb drives myself. They're pretty.

Check out the storage section of the Apple Store for ideas, though you can pick them up at any big box store too.
posted by rokusan at 2:56 PM on May 6

RE: Software:

I think Time Machine was developed for this purpose. What OS are you using?
posted by jabberjaw at 2:57 PM on May 6

Easiest software for sharing your music on your network: nothing needed but iTunes. Free and included with MacOS, of course.

Easiest software for backup: Apple's Time Machine, also free and included wit recent OS versions. But there's nothing wrong with, like, dragging some folders once a week. It's sure better than nothing.
posted by rokusan at 2:57 PM on May 6

(I called it MacOS instead of OS X. I am so old.)
posted by rokusan at 3:06 PM on May 6

Your basic run-of-the-mill external hard drive should suit you just fine. Be sure to check slickdeals.net or a similar website to find a good deal on one (e.g., $85 for 1TB).
posted by puritycontrol at 3:27 PM on May 6

We use Macs in our house and have a couple of different backup drives - one is a LaCie and the other is....something else. For backup, we both use SuperDuper! - the free version does almost everything, and the paid version (well worth it) does everything else.
posted by rtha at 3:58 PM on May 6 [1 favorite]

Look at Network Attached Storage (NAS) for a possible solution. NAS provides one or more hard drives that sit on your network independently of any computer (i.e., they aren't attached to any computer, so you don't have to turn one computer on to see the drive from another computer). That could provide an answer to the streaming music question. Unfortunately, Time Machine (easiest backup for Mac) is often difficult to implement on NAS.

Do you have an Airport Extreme (note: not Airport Express)? If so, you can attach a USB drive to it that will act as NAS and will support Time Machine. The drawback to that, of course, is that a failure of that drive would not only wipe out your original files but also your backups.

If you go the route of attaching a hard drive directly to one of your Macs, take a look at a hard drive dock along the lines of this one from Vantec. A 1 Tb solution would cost about $150. If you buy two bare drives, you could use one for backups and the other for day-to-day shared files, swapping them out as needed.
posted by joaquim at 3:59 PM on May 6

I'm not streaming iTunes from it, but I am using Time Machine to backup my iMac to a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 in an IcyDock enclosure. It's been working very well for almost a year now.
posted by DakotaPaul at 3:59 PM on May 6

2nding the 1TB MyBook. We have this one and it's super fast and indeed, pretty.
posted by ThaBombShelterSmith at 4:01 PM on May 6

What OS are you using?

currently dragging along at 10.3.9 but soon will upgrade OSX 10.5

very soon
posted by jammy at 4:04 PM on May 6

I'd probably take the belt-and-suspenders approach-- SuperDuper and Time Machine have different approaches to backups and recovery, and having both will cover your ass more effectively.

I've had good luck with LaCie drives of all sorts, and they're what my company uses to haul around terabytes of VFX data. Preferred drive manufacturer is sort of a religious war in computing; everyone will tell you something different.
posted by fairytale of los angeles at 4:36 PM on May 6

Be sure that you have enough RAM in your iMac G5 before upgrading to Leopard. It'll run fine, provided you've enough RAM. The minimum I recommend is 1GB and you should probably put in as much RAM as the machine will take. I believe all the iMac G5 models max out at 2GB. If you respond and tell us specifically which iMac G5 you have, we can look up the specs and tell you. How to identify:

- if the ports on the back run vertically, then it's a 1st gen iMac G5
- if the porst on the back run horizontally and there is no built-in camera, it's a Rev. B iMac G5.
- if the ports on the back run horizontally and there is a camera, it's a Rev. C iMac G5.

You won't be happy with Leopard unless you have enough RAM. You can buy from many places: Crucial, TransIntl.com, OWC (macsales.com) to name a few.
posted by mrbarrett.com at 4:40 PM on May 6

nthing a really big drive and SuperDuper! for backups. but, suggesting you find a FireWire disk instead of a USB one - USB has higher CPU overhead, and your machines are getting kinda long in the tooth. plus, if you partition your external into two chunks and use SuperDuper! to clone your iMac to one of the chunks, you can boot off of it when your internal hard drive fails. (you can't do that with a USB drive and PowerPC - i.e. G4 and G5 - Macs.) the price difference for a FireWire-capable drive over a non-FireWire drive is noticeable but not huge. (I recently spent around $150 for 1TB Seagates, but specifically because they had FireWire 800; if you don't need that - and you don't, 'cause you don't have FireWire 800 ports - you can get them cheaper.)

I also like Carbon Copy Cloner for backups as it does the bootable thing as well and is scheduleable for free.
posted by mrg at 5:25 PM on May 6 [1 favorite]

I bought this to use with my macbook pro after upgrading to Leopard. It. Is. Effing. AWESOME. So tiny and quiet, superduper fast, firewire compatible, and well worth the $. It's a gorgeous little piece of electronics.

I partitioned it 3 ways and use the smallest partition as my TM backup destination.

Bonus is that it's so small and light I can carry it around if/when I so desire.
posted by lonefrontranger at 6:02 PM on May 6

For what it's worth -- I have an iMac (intel) that I have two external disks hooked up to, for, among other things, storing my iTunes library. One's an older Firewire disk that I expect to die soonish, which is why I bought the second, a USB 2.0 disk. Both are from the same manufacturer. I regularly put my iMac to sleep to save power when I'm not using it. The firewire disk acts just like an internal disk -- it could care less. However, the USB disk must be unmounted (ejected) before I sleep it, or Finder completely freaks out the next time I try to access it after waking, even if that attempt is to eject it. It'll go all spinning beachball for many minutes until I give up and power the drive off, at which point Finder lectures me about ejecting disks before removing them. Sometimes Finder freaks out so badly I have to kill it from within a Terminal.app... sometimes Finder wigs out so badly it takes all the other apps with it, and I have to power off the machine to recover. It makes me so crazy I am probably going to go out and buy another Firewire disk and only use the USB one for stuff I don't often use. If you're a frequent sleep-without-disconnecter, that's just something you might like to be aware of before your shiny new disk starts the crazy-making with you too. :)
posted by sldownard at 6:03 PM on May 6

Contra sidownward's experience: I never disconnect my USB hard disks, and I sleep my Macs all the time. No Finder problems.

I have a couple of older Firewire drives too. I don't experience any speed difference, though it's not like I do video editing or anything very throughput-demanding, so I probably just don't notice.
posted by rokusan at 8:20 PM on May 6

I would personally never purchase another LaCie. After having TBs of data lost over the years to their shoddy firewire hotswap issues, I realized long-term peace of mind is worth another few hundred.

I recommend G-Tech. They are storage industry leaders and were recently acquired by Hitachi. Among their claims to fame are offering the first TB portable drive, the first 2.5" 500 GB drive, and the first SSD portable drive. They are favored by most photography and video professionals.
posted by Señor Pantalones at 3:23 AM on May 7

Apple makes the Time Capsule specifically for backing up multiple computers and serving as an airport base station.
posted by GPF at 7:30 AM on May 7