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Archiving / Working w/ Older External Hard Drives
Hey Experts,
I’m trying to get an archiving workflow up and running because I feel like two out of seven external hard drives we have are starting to fail.
We basically have 2 200GB drives bought in ’03-’04, 2 500GB drives bought in ’06-’07, 1 1TB drive bought in ’09, and 2 2TB drives bought in ’10. One of the 200GBs and one of the 500GBs seem to be failing – video glitches in QT & FCP, FCP project files now crash FCP, etc.
– What do you recommend for older external hard drives? Do you just no longer use them after a certain point? Or could we put one copy of less important projects on them?
– I was also thinking we could use the older hard drives for Time Machine Backups but it would really suck if a computer died and then the TM backup was NG because it was done on an older drive.
– I understand Macs don’t need to be defragged, but what about external hard drives? Does reformatting help or is there something else we should be doing?
– Also, what are people doing for off site / cloud storage solutions? I mean even if you have everything backed up, if there’s a fire or tornado and your home/office is destroyed, you’re kind of screwed.
Thanks in advance for your advice,
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Christian H. Clark
City Limit Films
http://www.citylimitfilms.com -
5 Replies
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Do not use those drives anymore!!! Get new drives, copy the footage off, and get rid of them. Dont even consider continuing to use failing drives.
Shane
GETTING ORGANIZED WITH FINAL CUT PRO DVD…don’t miss it.
Read my blog, Little Frog in High Def -
Lose the old drives and buy some new drives and put ’em in enclosures yourself.
Brand new 1Tb are less than $60, and 2Tb drives are less than $120.
David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.comPOST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™
Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums.
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This doesn’t necessarily apply to a drive that is already failing, but I remember reading somewhere that you should do a full surface scan of your external harddrives at least once a year, and you can’t just leave them idle for long periods of time.
Could you guys tell me the best way to do this? Using Disk Utility? Or do I need to buy a program like DiskWarrior? Or, if the harddrive manufacture supplies a program in the box, should I use that?
One person wrote in another forum: “If I had to use disks for archiving, I’d make sure that I attached them to a computer no less than once a year and do a full surface scan of every accessible sector on the disk using CHKDSK. This would re-map any sectors going “soft” before they dissolve altogether and take precious data with them.” Is there a “mac way” to do this?
Someone else there wrote “I stict to WD Diagnostic Utility running in Windows, [on the mac, i think] and I swear by the results and job it does.”
So, what’s the best way to approach this in your opinions? And even if a drive seems to be working fine, when does it become too old to use?
I mainly use the 2 TB WD MyBooks, either with firewire or with eSata. I haven’t had any crash yet, but the oldest one is only 2 years old. I’m more worried about my Lacies, which are between 2 and 6 years old)
Any advice would be appreciated.
Thanks!
Isaac -
Isaac, I think you are referring to this:
https://www.larryjordan.biz/technique-refreshing-hard-disk-storage/Shane & David, any thoughts on when an external hard drive becomes too old to reliably use, defragging or reformatting an external, or cloud storage solutions?
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Christian H. Clark
City Limit Films
http://www.citylimitfilms.com -
Sorry, I overlooked this. I’m going to try it out and will post an update…
thanks!
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