LaCie hard disks - the worst data backup device

In a post house with hundreds of clients walking in and out every day - editing, finishing, DI, VFX CGI - hard disks are as common as tapes. And clients bring their media and take delivery on hard disks as a matter of course. 

But by far the commonest drive that comes to us is LaCie. So by the law of averages, LaCie is the drive that fails the most as far as I've observed. And amongst Lacies the commonest and most catastrophic failures are in their RAIDs - 2-drive RAIDs.

LaCie Big Disk Extreme+ very bad choice for data backup
 

LaCie Big disk Extreme+ This is the latest one that has failed on me. It came with a client who needed a DVD from an HD Quicktime for her entire feature. We encoded off the drive and it worked without complaint for 14 hours. Air-conditioning was good so no temperature problems. Yet, a day later, the drive failed to mount. Checked and swapped cables, power supplies. Still no luck. Disk Utility and Disk Warrior don't see a drive. 

Apple System Profiler sees a Big disk Extreme + on Firewire but no drive. When I start up, I hear just one click-n-whirr. Where a two-drive LaCie (I have another working one) normally emits two click-n-whirr sounds. So I guess one of the two drives is history. And since all LaCie two drive drives are RAID 0 so is the data. 

The sad thing is that client had, along with Quicktimes of her feature, ProTools sessions for her entire two hour long feature. And she was on a tight budget. Very very sad. I haven't even bothered informing LaCie support. They have a no-reply policy for India in force, as far as I have encountered. 

I even have two LaCie Biggest F800 which have failed. First the Firewire 800 ports failed in both. One in the warranty period. Filling out support forms as well as sending mails to LaCie got no responses. Even the dealer put his hands up and said he could do nothing about it. So I resigned myself to running it off USB 2.0.

LaCie Biggest F800 - abysmal security at very high price.
 

Recently one of the drives in this Biggest F800 failed. The LCD display on the drive said "Disk 1 fail". It was RAID 5 so I thought no problem, data was safe. I proceeded to copy out all the data to another drive. No luck. Some of the data couldn't be read. 

I thought I could replace the failed drive with a new one. It was IDE 250 Gb, so I had some of those. After replacing the drive, the RAID was supposed to be rebuilt. That's what the documentation (and the dealer) said. But surprise. Now it said the replaced drive was fine and some other drive had failed. "Disk 2 fail". So now I had no data. 

Replaced the drive back with the old one. And now, all was fine. Still I thought I should copy it all to another. And then. Back to "Disk 1 fail". 

Bottom line. If you have data on your system's drive and want to back it up to an external drive. the absolute LAST choice should be a LaCie. And definitely not a LaCie two-drive RAID. Even a LaCie RAID 5 is not a good idea. It costs the Earth and more, and it offers no real protection against drive failure. 

My choice is a Western Digital single drive. And if you're paranoid, get a Seagate FreeAgent as well. Have both of the same capacity. And make them both single-drive drives. NO RAIDs. 

And then use a backup software like Time Machine or Silverkeeper to backup to both. Should any one drive fail, get a new one and copy data over on it. Then send the failed drive to Seagate or Western Digital for replacement. 

Both of them have a great replacement policy. Even in India. My first choice is definitely Western Digital. Not that they haven't failed. But at least they are prompt with replacements. And both talk to you on support. Reply e-mails as well. The only good thing about LaCie is Silverkeeper.

Backup without hassles

Everyone knows they have to back up their work. Nearly everyone has lost some data from drive or computer failure. Almost no one makes backups, or at least not often enough to make a difference. And when you really need a backup, the latest one is usually the only one of value. And mostly if its over a week old, its useless.

I've been in this as well and have somehow managed to find one possible solution. This is 'a' solution not 'the' solution. And I've been using it for a few months now.

Lacie Silverkeeper

It ships with every LaCie hard disk on a CD. But you can download it at the link above. And its free.

Very simple to use. Just decide which folder should be backed up. To where it has to be backed up - usually a Firewire or USB hard disk. And make a schedule for the back up. Mine is 9 am every day. Yes, every single day.

On the first day, it takes a while because all the stuff on the folder you specify is copied to the target. The next day and thereafter, only files that have changed are copied and overwritten. Overwritten, remember.

Files you delete from the folder you're backing up are deleted off the backup as well. So the backup is always an exact clone of the original. You can change this delete behaviour with one setting 'Never remove files'. I've done that. And you can specify excluded items. So I've marked 'Documents' for backup, but excluded 'Final Cut Pro Documents' from the backup.

You can decide to make multiple copies. So it you set that to 5, Silverkeeper will back up and make a new set each day, but keep 5 sets, deleting the next oldest one in rotation. I've not used this option.

Besides backing up data, a good backup solution should also help in restoring backed up data. I had occasion to test that. When I upgraded my MacBook Pro to Leopard I did 'Erase and Install'. So I lost everything - photos, music, videos, documents, Mail, FCP projects.

After Leopard installed, I just connected my backup drive and copied the backup folders in their appropriate places, and had my old MacBook back. I chose to do this manually as I wanted to pick and choose what I wanted back. Great way to get rid of clutter. But there's also a restore option that does this for you.

Very simply, LaCie Silverkeeper works. At their site LaCie say it works with Tiger up to 10.4.11, but not with Leopard. I'm using it with Leopard on my laptop. Seems to work. But then Leopard has Time Machine. I've yet to try that.

Silverkeeper only works on a Mac. For Windows, there's 1-Click also free and from LaCie. This too is on the CD that comes with every laCie drive.

Western Digital also ship backup software with their drives. I tried it
once, but I must confess I didn't give it much time since I was already using Silverkeeper and it worked for me.

Again, backup is important, everyone knows that. With Silverkeeper, the excuses to not backup just reduced by one.

Now to look for a great software to remove duplicates all over one's hard disk...