how to conveniently summarize (in one central location) the names of folders and files stored on multiple external hard drives?
Some of the hard drives will not always be mounted, but I will still want to see the contents the last time they were mounted
I am writing about my friends computer. He has a Macbook Pro and the other day had an Iomega 500GB plugged into the 800 firewire port. He for some reason accidentally pressed down hard on the drive, heard a grinding sound and it was no longer recognizable by the MAC HD. So, he then consequently plugged in his other backup drive to begin to make a clone, which is a LaCie External, and that drive then got corrupted when he plugged it in. So now, no backup what so ever.
Tonight, he went to an appt. with an Apple Genius Bar worker and they told him it was a coincidence and that once his Iomega was corrupted and he tried to boot the LaCie off of that, it corrupted the other drives too. He told my friend he has B-tree errors and needs data recovery on the external hard drives and that could be done.
My question is can he do this himself with an $100 program or does it pay to bring it into someone? He doesn't have a lot of $$$ to spend unfortunately so that's the issue. If anyone has dealt with this problem and has had a satisfactory outcome, please do not hesitate to advise!
I'm going to resurrect a thread that was started by Tilamook last year. It was was hijacked or sidetracked and I want to get it back on track, cuz it's a great question.
Quote:
Originally Posted by tillamook
how to conveniently summarize (in one central location) the names of folders and files stored on multiple external hard drives?
Some of the hard drives will not always be mounted, but I will still want to see the contents the last time they were mounted
Quote:
Originally Posted by tillamook
However, I don't have ... a RAID setup. I have 2 desktop drives (different capacities), and several other portable drives all of varying capacities.
I have a 2006 macbook 2 GHz, upgraded to 4 gb ram and 160 HDD. I don't feel like i have enough space so i decided to purchase a new harddrive and decided a 500 GB would do me just fine Though, i have all my data on this harddrive. I was thinking on making a full disk Time Machine copy of my disk and then restoring the new harddisk with that copy. But i don't know where to place that copy, since it is like 130 GB which is quite a big archive.
View 1 Replies View RelatedDo you ever turn off your external hard drive? I got mine (LaCie 1 TB, USB) always connected when I'm at my desk and the HDD is always powered, meaning I don't turn it off at the back (there is the power switch). The HDD goes into sleep mode whenever it's not doing anything, but still, is this bad for my ext. HDD to keep it always powered? Or should I turn it off when not using it?
View 18 Replies View RelatedI have a few external drives for my Macbook Pro. One of the drives is an Iomega MaxMini with USB ports on the back to add drives.
My question is; when I hook up the drives to my laptop I get about 4 drive icons on the desktop for each of the partitions, and when I need to remove them I have to eject them or move them to the trash icon.
Is there a way I can put the drives in a folder of some kind that I can just eject and make the desktop look less cluttered?
I have searched but I can't seem to find an answer to this question...
I have 4 x 500MB drives in my Mac Pro and 4 x 500MB external firewire drives.
Currently I use Carbon Copy Cloner to clone each internal drive to it's respective backup. ie Drive 1 > Backup 1, Drive 2 > Backup 2 etc
Is it possible to use Timemachine in a similar way? so that each internal drive has it's own corresponding Timemachine backup?
I am about to reach the capacity of my 3TB hard drive for my iTunes library.
Can I split my iTunes folder onto multiple hard drives?
Someone told me about setting up a NAS device. I wanted to see if there were other alternatives before I make that investment.
Info:
Mac OS X (10.7.3)
I would like to sort out all my drives and keep the organisation simple... it's recently turned into a bit of a mess after my hard drive on the iMac went into melt-down (fixed but having other issues... see other post! ) and as it had difficulty in backing up (for several months!) etc I did a mini panic of just saving my most important stuff on other drives - sometimes it would save on one drive but not other stuff so then had to use another drive etc... I have all my files etc but it's a bit of a mess... sooooooo. I have different things on different drives etc and it would be interesting to see how others organise themselves if they have multiple external drives. Which is best to use for time-machine back-ups and the other to keep all my photo's, videos and general other work on. I would like to keep my computer free of most of my work... maybe just have the current projects kept there. so far I have 53GB of photo's (I dabble in photography and work as a retoucher) I usually keep some original images and then there's the retouched or best images in separate folders. I'm studying digital media as well (BA) and while websites don't take that much space, the 3D stuff did and I've started doing stop motion animation ... then trying out different formats etc I end up with a huge amount of GB used up with .mov files (I'm new to moving images!) I have two desktop Western Digital Studios drives - 1.5TB and 500GB
I did used to just have the 500GB and kept the time-machine/backups on this disc and I recently switched this over to the 1.5TB but I'm wondering if I really need all that space just for back-ups - I can't personally see wanting a back-up from a year ago... a couple of months back maybe so should I switch my back-ups to the 500Gb drive and keep all my images/video/docs etc on the 1.5TB instead? also have 2 Western Digital portable drives - 320GB each. use one for Uni/work which means I can transfer large files to and from work computers to my home computer and I don't have to lug my macbook around ... plus the Uni doesn't have the same software versions as I do and it's easier just to take the files in rather than my laptop etc. I use one for keeping movies on - it's more convenient to keep my DVD films on the drive rather than keep taking dvd's out of the case etc... so my dvd collection is in a box on the wardrobe How do others organise themselves?
This is the third drive that has failed since I was assigned this Mac Pro at work a few weeks ago, and the drive was purchased less than a week ago. The other two were older drives. They would suddenly stop being readable. Sometimes there was a problem ejecting the drive before it stopped becomeing readable (message would say the drive couldn't be ejected because another program is using it, when there were no programs open). One of them eventually mounted again and I recovered some of the files (but some files weren't readable when I tried to copy them). But that was just luck as they all seem now to be consistently unreadable. When I plug them in I get the message: "The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer". same if I plug it into a different computer. And when I try to repair, it shows this: http://i.imgur.com/ivK9d.png. When it happed to the second drive, I just thought it was a fluke... but now a third, brand new drive? Something about the computer must be causing it.
View 14 Replies View RelatedI have two USB hard drives connected to my iMac. Since installing SL, I have experienced data loss on both. Example: I open a folder in the Finder. I then CMD-UP to move to the next level up, only to find that the folder I was just viewing is no longer in the list.
View 4 Replies View Relatedcan data from and external storage device from a windows system be used with a mac?
Info:
MacBook
Pro
I just got a used mac pro quad. I plan to use it for video production- final cut pro, pics - aperture, and music production- protools. THe computer came with 3 - 10k rpm 160g hd's. Two of them are set up as a raid 0. I like the idea of having a faster drive as a boot drive, but 160 seems kind of small to me as the drive to run memory hungry apps and the operating system. Am I right? I could go to a 300g 10k rpm drive. I am also thinking about getting a bigger drive, say a 750g or 1 tb 7200 rpm. Should I use this as the boot drive or as a secondary storage drive?. If it's the boot drive should I add the other 160g 10k drive to the raid or keep it separate? I assume that neither way would be wrong, nor create a problem, but since I haven't put anything on it yet, I'm wondering what would be the most efficient way to manage my files and get the most out of my computer.
View 16 Replies View RelatedI want to back up the internal drive on my Mac mini as well as an external data rive using Time Machine with a dedicated second external drive.
View 1 Replies View RelatedCan I attach multiple hard drives to my iMac chained by Firewire or do I need a separate port? I now have multiple Western Digital drives and find that sometimes they don't connect to the iMac so I'm wondering if I need a separate port or if my iMac FW port is faulty.
Info:
iMac 24", Mac OS X (10.5.6)
Is there any way for me to keep my data without using an external hard drive when switching to a bigger hard drive, I just got a macbook and I wanted to upgrade from the 120gb.
View 11 Replies View RelatedManaging a MBP with SSD and external drives for data?
Its come to the point of upgrading my 2007 MBP 2.4 to a new i7 that I'm thinking of ordering it with a SSD drive. Its the biggest 'hit' to increase performance it seems. Problem is the size of the SSD drives for cost. I can justify the 256GB model but not $1300 for 500GB which would be ideal, and even if I wait 6 months or so to get a 500GB I don't see the price coming down all that much. So...
Let say I order an APPLE SSD in my MBP and use it for a boot drive and some files. How do I configure/set-up the external drive to read its files for Aperture, iTunes, documents.... Thinking now is that I would use a WD 2TB external drive in RAID so I have the files on one 1TB and auto back-up on the other 1TB in one inclosure, and another 1TB drive for Time Machine.
This kind of limits my portability, so I'm also thinking I'd also have a portable larger HD to take with me when I need it. How do I sync the files I'm working on and adding to on one external drive with the other (as easy as possible)?
I may be thinking this all wrong, so any suggestions besides just the 'how to?'
I have a stock Macbook Pro 17in i5 laptop. I just got a new hard drive. I just did a time machine backup (to an external hard drive) of everything on my computer before i switch out the old drive to a new SSD OWC...Is this enough of a back up to where once i get the new SSD drive in i simply go to the time machine and it will put everything back the way i had it on the old hard drive correct? Or is there another step i need to take to make sure i transfer all of my data safely. I cant find my parallels product key nor my Microsoft word product key so i was wondering is this going to be an issue on the new hard drive? will the computer ask for the keys or since i backed everything up in time machine will it come back like normal.
View 3 Replies View RelatedI would like to always have one external hard drive attached to my iMac for Time Machine backups, and another external hard drive off site - periodically swapping the two. The though is that if there is fire or theft, it won't help to have a hard drive onsite attached to the computer, because both the iMac and the hard drive could be lost. Is Time Machine smart enough to allow me to configure two drives, so that whenever I plug in one of the drives, it can figure out what needs to be backed up?
Info:
27' iMac i7 Quad-Core, Mac OS X (10.6.2)
I just got a new MBP and I want to test how much battery life I am getting. Is there a way to do this other than just manually keeping track of how much time I used it for? A program or something that tracks it for me?
View 1 Replies View RelatedMy friends iBook hard drive has crashed and I'm in the process of replacing it. However, he had a lot of important data on that hard drive that he needs recovered. Is there any software that you can recommend (for Windows or OS X) that will recover data from corrupt/bad hard drives? I have software for NTFS/FAT32 but don't know of any good ones for HFS.
View 14 Replies View RelatedI have a dead La Cie Big disk terabyte external drive. It won't mount and it isn't recoverable the way it is. So I looked inside, it's 2 x 500 gig Seagate drives. So, I took the 2 drives out and installed one of them in a Mac Pro to see if it would mount on it's own. I figured probably not, since there were two drives mounted in this La Cie external case, they must have been RAID-ed together. I don't really know much about RAID, obviously.
Disk utility saw the disk, but it wouldn't mount and gave the unreadable message. Tried to disk utility it, and it gave file system errors, not surprised. It looks like you can't separate them, the RAID must split the files onto the two disks.
Is there any point to trying the utility Data Recovery on it? Or should I just tell my boss the only way to get the data back is to send it out to a data recovery place? I don't want to try and reformat them if there is still any possible way to get the data off them. I think the drives are fine and would work as a terabyte drive in the Fantom case if reformatted, but then we lose all these important projects.We seem to have the worst luck with external hard drives.
The odd thing is that I have another dead terabyte drive, a Fantom drive in which one of the 500 gig drives started clicking. I took both 500 gig WD drives out of the Fantom case and installed the two Seagate 500s from the dead La Cie case. It shows up in Disk Utility as an unformatted 1T drive. I was hoping it might just reconstitute itself in another case, but no go. If worse comes to worse, I will reformat it and it will probably be useable.
I recently picked up a couple of external drives, and decided to benchmark them to determine whether the interface and/or drive type made much of a difference. For those that don't want to read the details, here's the bottom line: If you're going to splurge on a FW800 interface, it's well worth fitting this with a 7200 rpm drive to maximize performance. Uncached sequential writes over FW800 were twice as fast on the 7200 rpm drive compared to the 5400 rpm. FW800 is a marked improvement over USB 2.0 as well. Full results are below. For background, when shopping for drives, I was interested in using the FW800 interface on the MBPs, for the simple reason it's rated almost twice as fast as USB 2.0. Some of the drives I was shopping for included 7200 rpm drives. My first thought was this was silly, since the interface limited the throughput to far-below the limits a 5400 rpm drive could produce, so why bother upgrading to 7200 rpm? Well, it turns out it does make a difference. I've got both a FW800 enclosure (G Drive Mini) and a USB 2.0 interface (Nexstar TX) as well as a 320GB 7200 rpm drive (Hitachi) and a 640GB 5400 rpm drive (Western Digital). So, I benchmarked both drives using both interfaces. Some interesting results! Turns out, the 7200 rpm drive does in fact dramatically improve performance in the FW800 interface. For sequential operations, Firewire has a dramatic improvement over USB 2.0; for random read/writes, drive speed seems to be a more important factor. And for large files, the combination of Firewire and 7200 rpm gives a pretty impressive throughput of almost 75MB/s. Full results are below. Note that the drive and interface are noted in the title bar for each drive.
View 18 Replies View Relatedi am very interested in buying a Mac. But I need an external hard drive for my stuff. What are the best 1TB or higher external hard drives for a Mac Book Pro?
View 4 Replies View RelatedI currently have a 2TB WD mirror edition that is setup in RAID 1 so it will mirror all my data. Now I also have a bunch of other drives laying around which I also feel the need to back up and currently I am doing this by doing a whole bunch of dragging and dropping and copying and pasting etc etc etc and this is making me very tired. I know that a setup is possible in disk utility but I am not at all sure about how to configure it so I wont lose any of my data.
Some details about my setup:
Mac OS X 10.5.6
PowerPc G5
Harddrives: two 1TB WD MyBooks, and two 500gig WD Mybooks --> these pairs need to mirror each other and make my life less of a hassle.
I often use external hard drives to back up my work. Recently I purchased a 1TB Lacie drive. I took a week to build a lovely new file structure for my work. At the end of this week, I began deleting the old files on other hard drives so as to transfer my new neatly structured work back on. In the midst of this, the brand new hard drive crashed, illiciting only the clicking sound of death.
That hard drive, some of my work (a very small amount but still) and a week's worth of sweat and blood was gone in an instant. The person I took it to to look at it mentioned a power surge as being a possible cause for the crash. Anyway, I returned the lacie and bought a 1T Western Digital Mybook (silver). I then began dumping the old back ups onto this.
A week in and this one is crashed too. No clicking sound of death. It calmly sits on my desk with it's unceasing unblinking blue light and refuses to show up in utilities no matter what I do. So I assume it's a goner also. I'll return it also of course. Is something causing these drives to fail...that exists in my walls? Are there power surges causing my drives to die...? OR is it simply a case of bad luck with my choices of new drives?
I was done doing various tasks on the iMac and when I decided to plug in the external hard drive for a Time Machine backup, the drive spun, but was never shown on the desktop.I also tried another external drive and had the same thing happen.
After rebooting (hey, this sounds like Windows!), the drive again showed up on the desktop and Time Machine worked fine.Is an external hard drive not showing up on the desktop a somewhat common issue?
i'm cloning my mac hd (mac book pro, snow leopard) and though i've made successful clones, the sum of the hard drives (mac hd and external hd) don't match. for instance, my mac hd reads at: 233.71 GB, however the cloned external hd reads at: 216.54 GB. can anyone explain this discrepancy? are there certain things that don't go into the clone that are on the mac hd?
View 2 Replies View RelatedHaving chosen a useful large external hard drive I find it says 'Windows only'. Surely, though the software will not work, all I need to do is format the HD and it will work. The machine is: Seagate FreeAgent 500GB External Hard Drive USB2.0 16MB.
View 1 Replies View RelatedI am relatively new to Macs, have been using it for 5-6 months. I already know how to do everything but share folders and drives using my network connection. I have an iMac and a Macbook Pro. I have a 120GB Hard Drive hooked up to the iMac via Firewire. How can I share that Firewire External Hard Drive with my Macbook Pro? What are the steps I have to follow to connect both macs? Is there a way that I could also share my iMac's desktop files with my Macbook Pro? I already have a wi-fi connection between both computers, I just don't know how to share that hard drive between both simultaneously..
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