Staying Alive & Choosing an External Drive

When I think about backing up my work, I’m always reminded of a Navy Seals saying:

“One is none and two is one.”

Ain’t that the truth? If you only have one microphone in the field and it breaks, then you have none. If you brought two, then you have one. Deep down inside, I think we all need to think like the Navy Seals, no matter how dainty our work can be.

So the next time you’re shooting a cupcake baking competition, you’ll have to look past all of that fluffy icing and the colorful jimmies, and think like a soldier. Your mission is to bring the proper tools and to get the job done. One is none, two is one.

When it comes to saving your work, the name of the game is to make at least two copies of everything. When it comes time to pick out an external hard drive to make this happen, a world of 10 million options opens up before you.

I’m currently in the process of picking out some external drives for production, and I figured I’d share my thoughts and the fruits of my research with you.

I’ve been thinking about upgrading my back-up drives for a long time. I put it off for so long that the market for external drives has completely transformed. The really expensive RAID drive that I had picked out as my top choice long ago has since been discontinued, and now there are similar drives available at a fraction of the price.

The price of hard drives has plummeted in the past couple of years. They started getting really cheap in 2008, and that trend has continued. I took a long look at the current external drive market, and I decided that instead of getting a fancy drive, I’m just going to get a couple of cheap ones. The key phrase in that sentence is “a couple,” remember, two is one… two is one.

The reason I wanted a RAID drive in the past was that I liked how it made two copies of everything automatically. A RAID drive actually has two hard drives inside of it, and you can set them up so that one drive just makes a mirror copy of the other one. I think the Navy Seals would approve of using RAID drives. It’s a case where one is two, and yet two is still one.

But I decided that I should let simplicity rule. The trouble with a RAID drive is that in the event that one of the internal drives dies, you’re safe because the other drive made a copy of your work, but you now need to repair your RAID drive by uninstalling the broken drive and installing a replacement.

Yuck! That sounds like work. Navy Seals like me don’t like work.

So instead I decided to just buy a couple of cheap USB 2.0 drives. I have a 500 GB internal drive in my MacBook Pro, and a 500 GB external FireWire drive. So I’m going to keep it nice and dumb, and buy two 500 GB USB 2.0 drives to back each one up. That’s it. Drop dead simple.

The model of drive that I’m zeroing in on is the G-Technology G-Drive Mobile. A friend of mine works as a professional video editor, and one of the production companies she works for insists on using G-Technology drives. I figure if they’re good enough for them, then they’ll be good enough for me. Besides, the USB-only model is cheaper and comes in white. And, for some reason, I like white equipment.

Another bonus is that these drives are bus-powered. So the simplicity theme extends to not even needing power cables. So that’s it. That’s my plan… this week anyhow. I may well be on to something else next week.

But one thing won’t be different next week: two will still be one, and one will always be none.