Disk Warrior / failed hard drive

My setup for my 27" iMac:

I leave the built-in drive for all applications and general day to day stuff (music [not a lot], documents, downloaded crap, etc).

I have a 500GB external (USB2.0) drive I store all of my Photos on (I'm an avid photographer).

The 1TB internal iMac drive and the external drive are both TimeMachine backed up to a 2TB external drive.

On top of that I pay $5 per month for unlimited backup storage with BackBlaze (http://www.backblaze.com). I was a Mozy user but they very recently switched up to a tiered model that priced me out of their service (I'm backing up approximately 270GB worth of data - almost all of that photos).

BackBlaze has been nice. Took about a week to do the initial upload (I'm on Verizon FiOS) but subsequent updates have been very quick. I did do a file restore shortly after getting the service to make sure it all worked and it did. Ironically, during the week that I was doing the upload, my 500GB Photo drive lost it's master boot record some how. Drive appeared to the OS as though it wasn't formatted and nothing built into the Mac could get it back. TimeMachine to the rescue on that one. I had all the data back in two hours or so. I'm content now with my double-backup solution.

 

Almost forgot ... I've never tried the hybrids, but solid-state hard drives, especially compared to your typically under-performing 5600rpm laptop drives ... is night and day. A 17" Macbook Pro is next on my list of computer purchases (when my 15.6" HP finally shats the bed) and I will definitely order it with the 128GB SS drive (or hopefully my HP lasts me another year or two and I get a higher capacity drive for lower price ... I love technology that way).

 

Amazon S3 isn't really geared as a backup solution. It's a cloud storage solution for accessing your files from anywhere. I just priced out what it would take to store 300GB worth of data in the S3 cloud along with making 20 Put/Copy/Post/List requests per month and the bill is around $41/month. And anyone with your ID/pword can access it from anywhere.

BackBlaze, like Mozy, is geared specifically towards data backup. You select which folders/drives you want to back up and how often you want to do it and that's it, BackBlaze software takes over the rest. Files are only accessible by computers you've authorized under your account.

Let me know if you figure out a way to make the cloud work though, I'm intrigued.

 

Let me know how you like the seagate ssd. I have used five or six different ones so far. I definitely prefer the ocz agility 2's. I almost got an ibis but it was cost prohibitive. Getting a preferred account with newegg always results in free rush processing and shipping.

I always just buy two drives that are identical and copy vital info to both of them. Two hard drives are not going to fail simultaneously. They are the storage drives and I always have a third that runs my os. Usually smaller and always SSD.

 

As far as software data recovery goes (Mac, Windows, Linux etc), it generally only works on small time file system shags. Anything worse then that and your drive goes off to a data recovery joint to have any chance at recovering anything.

A much easier solution is to BACK UP EVERY WEEK and to have multiple spots to back up to. A single external drive is better than nothing, but it's still not good enough. Start with several different externals and move on to having at least two web-based back up solutions. Don't worry about backing up your porn collection because restoring it manually via http is a good passer of time, and your wedding photos will be deleted the day the divorce is finalized so don't fret about them.

Also, if you are backing up to an offsite storage, encrypt your stuff with http://www.truecrypt.org/ and no one will get your data. They can brute force it, but good luck using my credit card number in the year 32014 (use a very strong password).

The Seagate hybrid is a pretty decent drive...and more of these should be popping up in the near future as 4-16 GB read caches on spindle drives that marry 50% of the speed of an SSD with cheaper capacity of a spindle drive.

Adaptive memory looks at your usage pattern and caches that to the flash based storage on the drive; flash memory is many, many times faster at access time than a spindle which makes them feel so fast to begin with. Top it off with reads that are easily 2x faster than a spindle and a 320 GB capacity (or more) and all for $100 and it's good device. Also, the Adaptive Memory takes time to learn what your OS and what you use the most, so it actually gets faster the more you use it.

It's not an SSD, though. If the data isn't in the cache, then the OS is going to pull it off the spindle which is very very slow in reads, (sometimes) writes and especially access times.

For a first gen hybrid, the Seagate is a decent buy. It largely removes the feeling of running through 50 yards of warm fresh rhino pucky while wearing snowshoes that most laptop drives offer.

Not to mention, it's the only thing big enough to hold your "Excel" spreadsheet collection.