Update: A few hours of unattended backing up later, and I’ve already burned through 214.79GB of space on the drive – including a full Carbon Copy Cloner image of my laptop’s drive, and all critical files from the two servers that I care about (and can still access). Whew!

I was copying over the latest MySQL dumps from our production servers, and got an interesting error – “write error” – meaning, of course, that the file could not be copied to the BDE. Mwaaaaah? So I fire up Disk Utility, and it greets me with this:

Great. I grab our copy of Disk Warrior, hoping to throw its advanced repair ninja mojo at the problem. No joy. It keeps finding errors, and complaining that it’s running slowly because of a disk error. Great. So, I decide to reformat the drive to start fresh. Blowing away 110GB of backups to try to fix the drive that’s supposed to be saving me this grief. I make 2 new partitions – one for a backup system, and one for data. I tell Disk Utility to verify each new partition. It chokes on the first one.

At this point, I’m guessing it’s a hardware failure, so pack up the drive to be replaced. Now, I’m sitting here without backups, hoping that Nothing Bad Happens™ before the drive is replaced and I have a chance to rebuild the backups… To add insult to injury, the SMART status on my desktop’s system drive temporarily flickered into “DRIVE FAILING” status, then returned to OK.

Update: I’m turning comments off for this post. I think it is just aggregating unhappy customers, rather than fairly representing what LaCie products are like in the real world. And, my blog isn’t a therapy group for disgruntled consumers. LaCie fixed my drive very quickly, and it’s been running as expected ever since. Give their support folks a shot – they did the right thing by me. Should be more productive that ranting into the night about a failed hard drive.

Now, I’m just finishing up with an initial backup of these files and directories to the BDE – using the Finder to manually drag stuff over into folders for each server and volume. Something like 100+ GB of important files, media and data. And the drive still has ~300GB free. I don’t even want to think about how long it would have taken to burn DVD backups…

I’ll be working on a script that will automate this backup, and then leave will be able to continue ignoring backups – knowing that it’s all getting done behind the scenes.

But, today Kevin The IT Elf dropped by my cube with a box – a LaCie Big Disk Extreme – 500GB (half a freaking terabyte) of room to backup with. And I think it comes with every modern connection type – Firewire 400, Firewire 800, and USB 2.0.

LaCie also provides a decent backup app in SilverKeeper – which will automatically backup stuff like my entire ~/dnorman directory, without making my system unusable during backup.

So, now I’ll set my Powerbook to backup via rsynch to my desktop, which will backup to the BDE automatically every morning at 2am. And hope an EMP doesn’t clear all of the platters…

I’m going to sound old here, but I used to have a top-of-the-line FWB RAID system for doing video in the mid-ninetees. 18GB, divided into 10 partitions. On a good day, it could push 5 megs per second. And it cost around $20K. Now, I get 25X the capacity, an order of magnitude increase in performance, for about $400. Heck, my iPod has more room and outperforms that early RAID. I’m a little scared about what kind of storage will be available in another 10 years…

Update: Don’t forget to disable Spotlight on big backup drives…