Backup delirium

[darkroomdemon]

I hope that I am not bothering the wrong folks with this.

I am a photographer with 12 years of digital images.

My Raw Archive contains over 100 GB of image files.

My Working folder contains over 80 GB.

Plus there are various and numerous project files.

My G5 has two internal drives:
Drive A @160 GB (soon to be 500 GB)
Drive B @ 500 GB

I currently do manual backups to two external 500GB LaCie drives, one for each internal drive.

My workflow often requires that I work in/out of many different folders and the manual drag/copy/overwrite dance is killing me.
Incremental backup would be sweet.

I have tried Retrospect, but the manual brought tears to my eyes and my first two trial attempts were busts.

Do I upgrade to Leopard and use Time Machine?
…Time Machine with Time Capsule?
…Time machine with LaCie externals?
…Use Lacie's SilverKeeper?
…Shoot myself now?
Etc.

I am not looking for a hobby. I need this backup process to be easy to set up and run, automatic and reliable.
Can anyone shed light on this mess?
Or should I go back to film? I know where that stuff is.

I thank you all in advance.

Cheers,

Leland

PS I also have a 1 TB external in an off site place and bring it to the studio once a month for an extended backup of everything.

 

[darkroomdemon]

I upgraded to OS 10.5, bought a 2TB Western Digital HD and set up Time Machine. Works great. I do not allow Time Machine to back up every hour unless the degree of work demands it. I just do a "Backup Now" from time to time.
Done.

I am pleased.

Best to all,

L

 

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Time Machine is great for backing up your entire system and being able to restore it to a state before some problem occurred. It's also great for retrieving individual files on-the-fly, as well.

I can also recommend Chronosync: http://www.econtechnologies.com/pages/cs/chrono_overview.html

It's fast, it's incremental, has several backup strategy options (two-way sync, one-way sync, backup, incremental backup, etc.), and has a scheduler program for scheduling backups.

 

[fryke]

Just be aware that when you _move_ pictures around, they're still backed up. If you have your work folder on the 100 GB drive and an archive on the 500 GB drive, you can let Time Machine backup both those drives to the 2 TB drive. That would make it work fine. Although, if you move/copy a file from the smaller to the bigger volume internally, you'll end up with more copies than necessary on the Time Machine backup, since Picture A on 100 GB drive and Picture A on 500 GB drive are seen, by Time Machine, as two files, both worthy of backing up. But better too _many_ copies of a file than none, eh?