storage on the mac where am i going to keep it all? oo-er, i think my drive has failed…
Post on 29-Mar-2015
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Storage on the Mac
“where am I going to keep it all?”
“oo-er, I think my drive has failed…”
Storage on the Mac
Storage is all about
BACKUpBACKUp
Schofield’s law of data : if you only have one copy of any piece of data, then it does not really
exist !
Storage on the Mac
• Magnetic media (floppy disks , Zip disks, hard drives)
• Optical media (CD, DVD)
• Solid state ( memory stick,
USB, thumb, pen, key, flash.. )
• Online ( .Mac, ISPs, host sites)
Magnetic mediaPros: • FAST! ( read / write times )• cheap ( around 50p per GB for hard
drives )• generally reliable
Cons:• disks can degrade (develop bad sectors)
over time• hard drives WILL fail (some day) - regard
this as an inevitability and plan your storage accordingly
Magnetic media• Floppy disks
Magnetic mediaZIP disks (Iomega)
( 100 MB, 250 MB, 1 GB )
Fast, reliable, still operational ( Drivers contained within every Mac system since OS9 )Expensive Superseded by memory sticksIdeal for: exchange / backup of small documents
Magnetic mediaExternal hard drives
( 4 GB up to 1 TB or more )
• Fast and cheap (50p per GB)• FireWire (faster than USB2)• May include backup software (e.g. Retrospect)• Can be partitioned when new (there are pros and cons)
Ideal for: weekly backups of your Mac’s entire hard drive, and daily backups, e.g. Home folder, iTunes, iPhoto
Magnetic mediaExternal hard drives
Ridiculous
Acronym to
Impress Dummies
Redundant Array
of Inexpensive
Disks
Multiple hard drives can be linked together in what is called a RAID
Optical mediaPros: • Cheap• Burners and software included
with most Macs• Versatile
( can store music, video, or data, “ready to go” )
Cons:• SLOW! ( read times, and even
worse write times )
• disks will not last forever, nowhere near the time that
shop-bought music and films will last ( it makes sense to buy good quality disks )
Optical media• CD - 80 minutes AIFF
audio, 650 MB data • DVD - 60 minutes HQ
video, 4.3 GB of data
• Can use either -R disks (burn once) -RW (re-write, re-use)
• Imminent: Blu-ray & HD DVD formats will provide from 15 to 30+ GB of storage space
Ideal for: permanent (archive) data backups, creating a bootable CD or DVD, storing your music and video
Solid state media Pros: • No moving parts to ‘crash’ or fail• Works “out of the box”• Compact and convenient • Range of memory sizes ( from
128MB up to 4 GB )
Cons:• slower read/write times than magnetic
( but infinitely faster than optical )
• are pre-formatted in PC FAT-16 - if you don’t need to share data with PCs, then reformat as Mac OS in Disk Utility ( will improve read / write times dramatically )
Solid state media Ideal for: versatile backup
and storage needs
Use low capacity drives for documents, settings, exchanging files with other users
Use medium capacity for email etc
Use high capacity for applications, music, etc
Online ( .Mac ISPs File
host websites )Pros:
• If your computer crashes, you still have your data
Cons:
• Useful space ( > 1 GB ) mostly needs to be paid for
• Transfer speeds
• How secure is your data?
Online ( .Mac )
• Designed for Macs, so many useful features
• Expensive ( $75 annual sub )
• Extra space ( > 1 GB ) costs
• Has many critics!
Online ( ISPs )
• Often give 1 GB space free to subscribers - e.g. BT does, I’m not sure tiscali does
• If they give you the space, use it (or lose it?)
Online ( File host websites )
• Ideal for pictures:Photobucket.com
ImageShack
• Large files: Megaupload.com
--> ( 30 days )
• Personal data: box.net --> (
10 MB max )
Everyone’s heard of YouTube and Flickr, but there are loads of hosts !
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