OWC Blog - blog.macsales.com

Tag-Archive for » clone «

Hard Drive Upgrades with Lion: Not Just a simple Clone Anymore

Thursday, August 11th, 2011 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Hard drive upgrades are a popular upgrade for many Mac users and there’s a few different reasons for that.

The first biggie is space. With all the files, pictures, movies, music, software updates, and other bits of info vying for space, that once-vast 500GB hard drive is now nearly full. A bigger hard drive means more room to put it all.

The second one is speed. Even on its flagship 17″ MacBook Pro, Apple is still stuffing a 5400rpm drive inside, which can limit how fast you can access your data. Simply by upgrading the internal hard drive to a faster 7200rpm drive or (better still) a solid-state drive like our OWC Mercury EXTREME series, you can nearly triple the performance of the 2011 MacBook Pros, and earlier models show similar gains – we did a whole series of videos about it not too long ago. But I’m getting off-track here.

Replacing a hard drive in most modern Macs is pretty simple, and our highly-acclaimed Instructional Series of videos breaks the process down so pretty much anybody can do it. The trick is making sure your data gets brought over as simply as possible, so you can continue on seamlessly. Article Continues…

This post has 55 comments.
Category: Tech Tips
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Transferring your data to a new drive.

Tuesday, December 7th, 2010 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Every so often, someone will ask me about transferring data from one drive to another. Whether they’ve just upgraded the hard drive in their computer or they’d like to make a backup of their drive, there’s often a question of the best method of making a copy of their data.

As OWC Angela brought to light here amongst the OWC Blog team, the most common way would be “cloning”—a process which many people know nothing about.

In case you’re one of those who don’t know what that is, simply put, “cloning” is the process of making an exact copy of the data from one drive on another. The result is a bootable drive with all the information and preferences as the original.

This process is very handy if you want to:

  • Make a “snapshot” of your hard drive at a particular point in time or interval as part of your backup plan.
  • Set up many computers with identical settings and software (such as in a computer lab)
  • copy all the data from your boot drive to another drive Article Continues…
This post has 3 comments.
Category: Tech Tips
Tags: , , , , , , ,

1.4 million files can’t be wrong… or can they?

Tuesday, January 19th, 2010 | Author: OWC Chris S.

heavy-driveRecently, while doing a little “housekeeping” on my work Mac, I noticed that I had less than 10% of my drive available. While I do have a lot of large project files I work on from day to day, I was sure that my files shouldn’t have taken up anywhere near that much space.

So, in an effort to find out where the excess fat on my drive was, I turned to Grand Perspective, a free little utility that maps out your hard drive and gives you an overview of what is where and how much space it’s taking up.

Fortunately, I caught my problem early on into the process. In my case, the culprit was unusual but not unheard of.

On the root level of your drive, there is a hidden folder called Volumes (you can get there by hitting Command-Shift-G in the finder, then typing in “/Volumes” in the window or sheet that pops up). In this folder are aliases that point to the actual volumes mounted on your Mac.

Sometimes, when a drive is unmounted in an unusual manner (such as unplugging it without ejecting, then reattaching immediately), the alias to the drive is duplicated, showing up with a number after it. While you don’t see this on the desktop, it is still there. When you properly unmount the drive, the last alias created disappears, but that “original” alias remains. In and of itself, this isn’t much of a problem, a minor annoyance at best.

The problem is that the drive that was experiencing this “dual identity” was the drive I clone to. In my Volumes folder, I had four aliases of this drive. Unfortunately, when a drive isn’t available, a program will sometimes create a file or folder out of this alias and start to write to it as if it were its own volume.

That’s what happened to me. At least one—probably two—of the aliases had my backup written to it. As the Volumes folder is usually skipped by a clone, there weren’t any recursive backups, but it was enough to fill up my hard drive.

Fortunately, the solution was incredibly simple. All I had to do was unmount my clone drive, drag all the remaining aliases of that drive out of the Volumes folder and into the trash, and then empty the trash.

That got rid of over 1.4 million “extra” files – over 60% of my drive. That’s a lot of garbage.

The moral of this story is to keep an eye out on how much room is available on your drive. If it starts filling up faster than it should, you may want to check things out and make sure you don’t have a “hidden drive” on your computer.

Comment on this post.
Category: Tech Tips
Tags: , , , , , ,

Make sure your backup strategy is protecting you.

Thursday, December 17th, 2009 | Author: OWC Chris S.

OWC-Helmet

We talk a lot about backing up around here; I’d say it has been the third-most popular topic here on the OWC Blog, behind memory upgrades and price specials. In fact, OWC Mike H. posted a piece about backing up early last week.

However, this time around, I’d like to take a slightly different track that we don’t always cover – even with automated services like Time Machine, backing up still needs to be an active process.

In the interest of full disclosure, I’ll relate that this particular topic stems from recent personal experience. Earlier this month, my father (who I help with the upkeep on his Mac mini at his company) had his main hard drive fail on him.

“No problem,” I thought, “I set up an automated nightly backup on the system. All I need to do is replace the internal drive, then restore from the backup and we’ll be good to go.”

Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite that simple. Sure, we made annual backups to CDs, mostly for record-keeping purposes, but trusted that backup software to do the rest in between. The problem is that for some reason, the backup routine had stopped sometime over April of last year. As it had run reliably for quite some time prior to that point, we’d never checked it for consistency – that was our major mistake.

As a result, none of the data created since the beginning of the year was backed up when the hard drive went bad. Considering the amount of money involved with the data (I won’t go into details, but it is rather significant), the concept of losing it all is pretty much catastrophic.

There are a pair of lessons we can learn from this story:

1.) Automatic backups need to be periodically checked.

Check your backups from time to time just to make sure all the data is in good shape. In my case, it would have also helped to determine whether or not the darn thing was backing up in the first place. Believe me, the worst time to find out your backup is out of date or no good is on the day you need it.

2.) Make multiple copies of data you can’t afford to lose.

I also recommend keeping one or more these copies off-site, so if one backup fails (or is damaged, etc.) you at least have copies of the really important data somewhere.

Fortunately, OWC has all the equipment you need to set up or improve your backup strategy. From our award-winning external Storage Solutions, to recordable media, to replacement internal drives for ones that have failed, we have you covered.

Oh, as for our little story above, we were fortunate enough to be able to recover the “lost” data by using Prosoft Engineering’s Data Rescue 3. We hooked the failed drive up to another computer via an OWC Express enclosure, and let Data Rescue go at it. It took about a week to process, but from all the checks we’ve done, it appears that all the data that had once been “lost” has now been recovered.

I love a happy ending.

One Comment
Category: Random Thoughts & Topics, Tech Tips
Tags: , , , , , , ,

Synchronicity

Thursday, July 16th, 2009 | Author: OWC Chris S.

Every once in a while, my day-to-day computing adventures manage to coincide with something that’s reverberating through the Macintosh Community at large. This last week was just such an example.

Over the last week or so, there have been a number of discussions in a number of forums regarding backups in general, with a focus on Time Machine in particular. Oddly enough, about this time last week, the boot drive on my work machine crashed.

As you may have guessed, I am a huge proponent of regular backups. I’ve written  articles about it. I’ve given presentations at Macworld about it. Now, I’m blogging about it. You could say I have a bit of a fixation on backing up. Fortunately, this fixation meant that I was able to keep working while a new drive was procured and was running at full speed again within a couple hours.

After dealing with that then seeing the unusual jump in articles discussing backup, I figured it may be prudent to explore some common backup methods.

Time Machine

A lot has been written about Time Machine. I, myself, have written a couple articles on the topic: one when it first came out and a wider-ranging one a couple of months ago.

Personally, I use Time Machine fairly frequently, as I have the unfortunate habit of emptying my Trash almost reflexively. It’s hard to say how many times Time Machine has enabled me to retrieve a file I just trashed. That protection is well worth the cost of a decent external drive.

Cloning

Time Machine is incredibly useful and effective, except in one instance: when you need to be back up and running quickly. That’s where a “clone” of your drive comes in handy.

Effectively a “clone” is a file-for-file copy of your boot drive. That means that if your main drive goes down, you can boot from your cloned copy and pick up at the last backup point. Unfortunately, everything you did after that point is lost.

Cloning software is easy-to-find. A copy of the popular Carbon Copy Cloner is included with every OWC and Newer Technology Storage Solution. You can even automate the backups to be as frequent as you want.

Hardware redundancy

Of course, if you want to always have a completely up-to-date “backup” that works automatically, then you may want to look into a RAID of some sort. The easiest to use would be the NewerTech Guardian MAXimus, which is an all-in-one Mirrored RAID (RAID 1). If one drive fails, there is an automatic copy which you can run off of until you can replace the failed drive.

A little more advanced is the OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Qx2, which can provide more advanced RAID setups and larger capacities.

Its instantaneous nature is both a strength and a weakeness. Because it copies file information without an intermediary, if a file is corrupted on one disk, it is corrupted on the backup as well.

Additionally, you are limited to the speed of the bus you are connected to. If you have eSATA capability on your computer, this won’t be a problem – the total bandwidth available is higher than the physical drives can output. Otherwise, you’ll need to use FireWire 800,400, or USB 2.0. Those busses, however, will be saturated by the drives, potentially slowing the system down.

Combinations

This is exactly what it sounds like: a combination of two or more methods. This helps offset the weaknesses of one method with the strengths of another. In my instance, I have one drive dedicated to Time Machine, and another that is a fully-bootable clone, which I update daily. When my drive went down, I was able to boot to my clone, and retrieve any new, non-cloned files I needed via Time Machine.

Another option would be to run your system off of a RAID 0 (or RAID 5) and use another (single or RAID) drive to hold Time Machine backups. The variations are only as limited as your imagination and budget.

Don’t Delay

Backing up is something you don’t think about until your hard drive fails. Unfortunately, it isn’t a matter of “if” but of “when.”

Do you have a plan in place for when the inevitable happens?

This post has 5 comments.
Category: Tech Tips
Tags: , ,