Hard Drive Synchrinising

[ppentertainments]

At present I have my gig hard drive which is the one kept up to date. My backup hard drive I update about once a month by formatting it and then copying all the files over from the main HD.

Is there an easier and quicker way of doing this too keep the back up HD more up to date. My worry is that if the main HD does go down it would be sods law that the tracks needed won't have been copied over.

[Solitaire Events Ltd]

How have you got your songs grouped?

[Excalibur]

This may not be the proper way to do it, but as my tracks come in, I put them on a flash drive, and copy them to the drives in turn, deleting them after the last operation. Thus all drives are theoretically updated simultaneously.

[Vectis]

I have my gigging drive organised in such a way that only two folders need to be refreshed in order to clone them... one called "Chart 2009" (which is obvious really) and one called "Events 2009" in which I keep copies of specific customer requests grouped by function.

I use the "Events XXX" folders at year end to determine if anything is worthy of promotion to my main folders, and the "Chart XXXX" usually results in a couple of dozen of the year's best songs being filed elsewhere for quick reference.

So I don't "clone" per se, other than once a year. Updates take about 5 minutes each month or so.

[Danno13]

Take a look at this http://www.scootersoftware.com/

Brilliant peice of software, syncs both ways and only does the files that have changed so saves loads of time!

[Vectis]

My advice to anyone considering 2-way sync software would be to ensure you have a 100% complete read-only backup elsewhere.

One mistake...

[nigelwright7557]

At present I have my gig hard drive which is the one kept up to date. My backup hard drive I update about once a month by formatting it and then copying all the files over from the main HD.

Is there an easier and quicker way of doing this too keep the back up HD more up to date. My worry is that if the main HD does go down it would be sods law that the tracks needed won't have been copied over.

On some PC's you can set them up as raid.
There are various modes for raid but one is to copy the data to two seperate drives.

I have never done it but there will be plenty of info if you google it.

[Vectis]

On some PC's you can set them up as raid.
There are various modes for raid but one is to copy the data to two seperate drives.

I have never done it but there will be plenty of info if you google it.

Nay, Nay and Thrice Nay.... :eek:

To utilise RAID as a method of cloning disks is a very risky business indeed. It CAN be done (RAID 1 mirror) BUT a regular breaking/making of the mirror is bound to cause long-term issues, quite apart from the remaking process taking hours and battering the hell out of your disk subsystem all the time it's happening.

RAID is great for failover but it absolutely isn't designed for this purpose.

[ppentertainments]

How have you got your songs grouped?
I have folders according to type ie now, artists, motown etc then sub folders for each album title. I prefer to keep this way incase I ever use cd's again.


This may not be the proper way to do it, but as my tracks come in, I put them on a flash drive, and copy them to the drives in turn, deleting them after the last operation. Thus all drives are theoretically updated simultaneously.

Sensible !!

[Excalibur]

Hey, don't go calling me sensible, it's bad for my image! :D

[nigelwright7557]

Nay, Nay and Thrice Nay.... :eek:

To utilise RAID as a method of cloning disks is a very risky business indeed. It CAN be done (RAID 1 mirror) BUT a regular breaking/making of the mirror is bound to cause long-term issues, quite apart from the remaking process taking hours and battering the hell out of your disk subsystem all the time it's happening.

RAID is great for failover but it absolutely isn't designed for this purpose.

I did say I hadnt used, just heard of it.

Personally I just copy directories to a second hard disc and then to a large flash drive.

[CRAZY K]

At present I have my gig hard drive which is the one kept up to date. My backup hard drive I update about once a month by formatting it and then copying all the files over from the main HD.

Is there an easier and quicker way of doing this too keep the back up HD more up to date. My worry is that if the main HD does go down it would be sods law that the tracks needed won't have been copied over.

I dont update too often as I dont cover many Disco Discos but all I do is open up the HD on my laptop--drag over new tracks which I have stored on the Laptop and then run the Cortex for about 30 minutes to bring everything up to date. Time taken depends on number of tracks but I guess a lot of us only have 4,999;)

Rather than update the Cortex datatbase I delete it on the HD and run it from scratch. Just a preference.

Surely all this doesnt take long and can be done whilst having a cup of tea or multi tasking elsewhere :D

CRAZY K

[Tony Scott]

This may not be the proper way to do it, but as my tracks come in, I put them on a flash drive, and copy them to the drives in turn, deleting them after the last operation. Thus all drives are theoretically updated simultaneously.





Sensible !!

This is how I do it too....sensible! :D

[Marc J]

I use http://www.goodsync.com/ but as Martin says - BE CAREFUL!

Will shortly be treating myself to one of these (http://www.qnapstore.com/index.php?act=viewProd&productId=32) with a stack of 1/2Tb drives in it on RAID 5 + Spare, along with an external 1.5Tb drive for backing it up. I've installed these for clients before, and the backup uses rSync which is fairly fast and kicks in when you plug in the external drive.

They are very impressive bits of kit, with a feature to access it remotely via FTP or a web interface which is really handy when out and about:) The wireless cameras are great, too...you can watch them from anywhere online and set them to record triggered by motion detect :)

[welby]

Hi I use this:

http://www.superflexible.com/

It just works - I have 4 Disk drives and once you have done the initial mirror, keeping them in sync is a breeze. You can run the software in either attended mode or unattended mode and you can schedule also!


Highlights:

Runs on Windows 98 thru Vista and Server 2003/2008

Copy or synchronize data between local drives and/or network drives

FTP, SSL, SSH, WebDAV, and Amazon S3 support

Includes ZIP compression and Encryption

Scheduler can run as GUI or as a Windows Service

Copy file permissions and file shares

Trigger a job as soon as a network resource becomes available

Copy locked files on Windows XP/2003/Vista/2008

Run profiles in parallel

Partial updating of large files (delta copying)

Oh and another thing - it's very fast - to initially mirror a 1TB disk took 40mins!

Hope this helps

[Shakermaker Promotions]

Everytime I update my main external HD, I update everything else too (the HD2500). This ensures that everything is mirror'd. I made the mistake ages ago of not doing it and making a folder up titled 'Transfer' so I could remember to update and guess what....I forgot! Low and behold, that night someone asked for a track that I knew I had but it wasn't there because I hadn't updated everything at the same time.