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Fast, reliable, still operational ( Drivers contained within every Mac system since OS9 )Expensive Superseded by memory sticksIdeal for: exchange / backup of small documents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 !