RAID for Dummies?

[mattkime]

I looked into RAID solutions for a couple of photographers I work for and my result was -

You need a good indexing system and archive things onto dual firewire drives.

Stuff that you're currently working on can be backed up with SuperDuper or Retrospect or better yet, both.

[SeattlePhotog]

[quote mattkime]I looked into RAID solutions for a couple of photographers I work for and my result was -

You need a good indexing system and archive things onto dual firewire drives.

Stuff that you're currently working on can be backed up with SuperDuper or Retrospect or better yet, both.
Good call, matt. I DO archive my "retired" jobs onto multiple FireWire drives, plus a couple of DVDs each, just to be safe.

The current jobs are the ones I'd like to have duplicated on my system drives. My workflow is very, shall we say, "fluid", so sometimes there are multiple editions of images in-process...plus little side-folders for secondary orders. It's a mess.

[rosebud]

Hey "Bert",
Here's how I handle these kinds of data migrations. You've already got everything you need:

1. Shutdown and install the 2nd 500 Gb drive. Personally, I'd put 500 GB drives in bays 1 & 2, the 300 GB in bay 3. Reboot from the 300 GB drive.

2. Use Carbon Copy Cloner, or Disk Utility, and make a bootable disk image of your 300 GB disk. Make the currently formatted 500 GB disk the target for the disk image. If you have anti-virus software installed, make sure it's disabled, otherwise it will scan the disk image being created and interupt the process. If your target disk is a Firewire drive, make sure you de-select "Ignore permissions on this disk" (command-i).

3. When the image has been created, copy it to the 300 GB disk.

4. Use Disk Utility to make a mirrored RAID using the 500 GB disks.

5. Now use Disk Utility's "Restore" tab to restore the disk image to the newly created 500 GB RAID-1 volume. Drag the DMG from the 300 GB drive to the left pane of Disk Utility, then drag that link to the "Source" field in Restore. Drag the new, blank, RAID volume from the left pane into the "Destination" field. Click "Restore".

Personally I'd use the 300 GB disk as a backup. First copy the DMG you made to the new RAID volume. Erase the 300 GB, and install a fresh, basic OSX system on it. Add as many disk utilities and other tools as you can find. Copy back the DMG of your old system. Pull the disk out and store it for posterity (safety deposit box?). Reinstall to occasionally re-image your system as a backup. No reason to leave it installed, and running all the time.

Disk images are your friend.

Now you've got the identical contents from your old drive on the new RAID. Serial numbers and everything intact! --Brad.

[SeattlePhotog]

Dang! I was with you all the way to "Bay 3".

My G5 only has two bays. I can buy another insert thingie to cram some more drives in there, but I'm not gonna do that. I'll get an Intel Mac before too long, and then I'll have FOUR bays!

From what I read, though, I might be able to use your instructions by:

1) Erasing the current "backup" 500GB drive.

2) CCC-ing the existing 300GB main drive over to the newly-cleaned 500GB drive. Now I've got a "new" 500GB main drive.

3) Pull out the 300GB drive and stick it into the external case. Good-sized external drive!

4) Install the NEW new 500GB drive. Now I've got 1 TB of storage-y goodness. Set up ChronoSynch to backup the entire main drive every night.

Any holes in that plan?

[mattkime]

>>Any holes in that plan?

Sounds like a good plan.

[jdc]

You might consider paying for superduper -- it is the best backup software for OS X, and there are tests to prove it if you google it (maybe check barefeats too?)

and you will want to set it up for an incremental backup so that every day it only backs up what you worked on, not the whole drive

the only issue i see is whether or not you can do incremenatl back ups of your system, i have no idea if that is possible

in my studio i have 3 macs going to an external FW 400 dual bay case with 2 400 gig drives in it. every night at 11 pm the 1st drive backs up to the second drive, which is usually about a gig worth of stuff. i use silverkeeper (free) and its never missed a day.

this is data only, since if any one machine really did die we could always reinstall from scratch, since we own all of our own programs, etc. might take a couple of hours at most, but thats about it

[SeattlePhotog]

That seems like a workable plan. I'll check out SuperDuper now. Thanks!

[rosebud]

Sorry herbiesyufy, I was visualizing a 4-bay Mac-Pro when I mentioned "bay-3". Mac Pro and sugar-plums dancing in my head....

There's two problems I see in your reply.

You don't need to erase the 500 GB disk before using it as the target for CCC. And remember to copy the DMG back to the 300 GB disk (from the 500) before you pull the 300 out. Remember, the 500 GB disk will be erased when the RAID is created.

The other is that you'll only have 500 GB storage after making a RAID-1 from the two 500 GB disks (a mirror). You won't have 1 terabyte of storage like you mention.

The free DiskUtility app is fine if you only want to image the entire volume all the time. CCC lets you omit top-level items from the image. SuperDuper gives more control. Just make sure it's a compressed image (no blank space) unlike a disk "clone" which copies blank space (ie; a clone image of a 120 GB disk with 8 GB of data on it is 120 GB is size).

Installing the 300 GB disk in a Firewire enclosure is a good idea. You can boot the G5 computer from it if necessary (boot with Option-key down, choose FW disk).

With the 300 GB disk on a FW enclosure (with the DMG on it), and the two 500 GB disks installed internally, boot from your OSX install CD/DVD. Walk thru the first few screens, stopping short of actually installing OSX. When you see the Utility menu at the top of the screen, select Disk Utilty. Now you can configure the RAID on the 500 GB disks, and while still in DiskUtility, go to the Restore tab. Now you can select the DMG from the FW disk as the source, and the new RAID as the destination.

I personally backup my iPhoto library by burning DVD's of the dated photo folders every couple months. Even though I've got DMG's of my disk (photos included), I don't want to trust photos I can never re-take to one type of backup.

FYI - the images you create from your PPC system won't work on a shiny new Intel Mac. Use Disk Utility on the Intel system to do those, and keep them separate from the PPC images.

Good luck! --Brad.