Looking for a reliable 1tb external hd using Firewire 800. Going to be used with OSX 10.6.8 on my 1tb iMac with Time Machine, backing up hourly.

Don’t need portability.

Any thoughts on something solid? And where are the good prices?

Firewire ones are hard to come by aren’t they? Not got eSata or USB3.0?

Nope, just USB2 and FW800. iMac was purchased October 2010.

I have four lacie hard drives and never had a problem

http://www.pixmania.co.uk/uk/uk/685807/art/lacie/hard-disk-external-hard-d.html

do the first time machine back up via ethernet i found that was quick then went over to firewire and usb.

Iomega minimaxl here. Been using it as an Airdisk attached to the back of the Airport Extreme. It’s been switched 24 hrs a day for 2 yrs, no issues.

time capsules are also good i have a 2tb one at home.
I also just picked up a 1tb one off ebay for a £100

Lacie D2 Quadra. Solid as a rock. Cheap as chips…….

LINK HERE

Just use a USB one. FW800 things tend to be overpriced and you don’t need the fast transfer speeds for a regular time machine backup. If you have many files, it’ll still take hours the first time. What additional backup system will you use?

If your iMac HDD is 1TB I suggest you go for a 1.5TB or 2TB external drive to give you the ability to go back a bit further in time than ‘just now’ if your iMac HDD is going to fill up.

You can pick up the Seagate 3TB free agent drive for under £100. 2TB of Time Machine space and 1TB of extra storage?

I have a 1TB WD one about to hit ebay.

prettygreenparrot, i’ve had good results using my Lacie FW800 160gb, but it’s just not big enough.

additional backup is via SmartUpdate on SuperDuper to a Sparse Bundle on a WD 640gb USB2 drive. takes about 2 hours, and gets done once a month in the background. any recommendations on backup strategy? running my own one man graphic design business – working about a couple of hours each day on leaflets, brochures, identity etc. small scale stuff.

How easy is it to back up a PC & Mac to the same HDD?

takes about 2 hours, and gets done once a month in the background. any recommendations on backup strategy? running my own one man graphic design business

so what happens if you have a drive failure/theft/cup of coffee incident the day before the scheduled back-up? do you lose a months worth of work?
why not back up after every couple of hours work.

MrSmith, Time Machine backs up hourly. the SuperDuper backup is there in case the TM backup drive fails.

ah, sorted then. (hitachi)

i recommend the g-tech 1-2-3 tb drives, they have e-sata too if you decide to use that interface at a later date as well as fw800/usb

whoops my edit went wrong, G-tech is the pro brand owned by hitachi

Just use a USB one

What he said, once the initial TM backup is done it’s difficult to notice any difference in connection speed.
Have you taken the Lacie apart? You can probably just replae the disk inside with a bigger one. If it’s old skool PATA you’ll struggle to get past 500Gb though, and it’ll probably be cheaper to buy a 2Tb USB drive.

Regarding your backup strategy, sounds pretty good to be honest. I probably wouldn’t even bother with the SuperDuper clone, but I don’t have my work on my home PC. Just remember the backup isn’t an archive (necessarily .. though TM will go back a fair way) and have other copies of your work history copied off permanently and kept offsite. A rotation of drives with clones on them might be enough. Or look at something like Carbonite and automate the offsite process of the important stuff.

Just remembered – I had a FireWire caddy, bought it off EBuyer so you might be better off buying disk and caddy separately .. Icy Box I think it was.

The Western Digital My Book HDD’s are available as RAID versions, which is what I would go for, and in fact will be my next major purchase. Much cheaper than the G-Tech ones, but not as posey looking.