Backing Up My Ex HD Problems....

While a Drobo or RAID array will go a long way towards providing a fail-safe backup solution, in addition to the possibilities of fire or natural disaster that have been mentioned, the following points should be kept in mind:

1)Although unlikely, it is conceivable that all of the drives in an array can be simultaneously corrupted or damaged, by failure of the surrounding controller circuitry, or failure of the power supply that is powering the drives, or by virus infection.

2)If at some future time the controller hardware were to fail, and the same or a similar controller were no longer available, depending on the RAID mode that is used the data on the hard drives may be unrecoverable, even if the drives and the data on them are intact. RAID mode 1 (simple mirroring) is an exception to that.

3)Although incrementally uploading files to an online backup site, as the files are created, will be fast and convenient for those having fast internet connections, if ALL of that data ever has to be downloaded for recovery purposes it may take a LONG time. For instance, downloading 1000 gigaBytes of data via an extremely fast 30 mbps connection, such as I have, would take approximately 70 hours, or even longer if the computer at the other end (at the site) is not fast enough to avoid limiting the download speed. More typical USA connection speeds would increase the 70 hours to several hundred.

My backup procedures for anything important are simply to copy it to multiple external drives, that are connected to different computers and located in different parts of the house. I should keep one of them offsite, but I haven't bothered to do that.

I also use a drive imaging program to create image files of the main internal hard drive in each computer (the drive containing the operating system and program files), so that I don't have to reinstall, update, and set up all of my software if that drive were to fail. I store the images on multiple internal and/or external drives.

Regards,
-- Al

the current Drobo's actually guard against up to 2 hard drive failures in the array. But, as Sufentanil says, if you want to guard against physical damage, you need some off site storage.

Jtb,

No, RAID only protects against a single hard drive failure. That's it. For the rest of the possibilities you mentioned, you need offsite backups. If you have a fast Internet connection, you can consider one of the online backup solutions as an option (I personally use iDrive).

Michael

That was it. Some how, in the past, I must have copied my music files into the music folder on my back up drive, thus duplicating the back up. Thanks for the help.

BTW - Does backing up in a RAID or to a Drobo do anything to protect you files from fire, flood, or other type of force majure?

Thanks for the help, jtb

I second the above recommendation to browse the drive and see what is filling it up. Likely it is either you've created a duplicate copy of the folder, or you first deleted the folder without going to the trash and selecting "empty trash", which releases the files that were formerly just marked for deletion, rather than having been fully deleted initially.

Michael

instead of doing this you should look at having someone configure a RAID array of storage for you to automatically back up your music, or buy a Drobo which does the same thing. The Drobo solution is more expensive than the RAID, but much easier for the non-tech savvy to use.

Plus, you won't lose your music.

Can you browse into the ext drive? If so then you can see what is there and delete what is old or un necessary.

Sorry, but I just noticed in your system link that you're a Mac user. Btw, you have a very nice system! Unfortunately the SyncBack software that I linked to above is only for PCs. I'm sure you can find some similar backup software for the Mac, but I have no experience to make such a recommendation.

It seems likely that Albertporter's assessment is correct, and that you may have created multiple copies of your Music folder that are exhausting the available space on your WD drive. I'd also suggest formatting the WD and then using backup software to maintain your desired data redundancy. A free program that I use and have found to be excellent is SyncBack. It allows you to have either automatically scheduled backups of any desired directories or to just run on request, and only writes new files and folders that have been created since the last backup. Very efficient and it will prevent you from creating multiple instances of your data unless you set it up to do that intentionally. Best of luck, and let us know how it goes!

Is it possible your WD library has multiple copies filling up the space?

You can always format the WD and begin again.