#Shotput pro for mac archive

#Shotput pro for mac archive

Having a second car back at home would be your archive – it takes time to recover, and it doesn’t help you immediately when crashing. Backups are a cost-effective way to know you can very quickly restore a file when something goes wrong with data that is in active duty. Having a safety belt in your car while not using it doesn’t help you when you crash, and it’s the same with backups.

It’s why you made them in the first place: as a safety belt. Still, while RAID uses its “backups” continuously, a lot of people frown upon having to actually use a backup, as if it’s a dirty thing.īackups are meant to be used. RAID controllers use a similar process to make sure files are recoverable through parity checks. Together, they can serve back 100% of the data - if a file on one backup gets corrupted, nothing is lost as there will be a duplicate in at least two more places. That’s a big plus, as backups are group animals. If drives are of comparable write speeds, with proper software, it should not take longer to create three than it does to create one. Because they always exist in multiples, there’s a big speed gain to be had when created simultaneously. Even though many think RAID is a backup, it is not: even when in mirrored mode, both copies cannot be verified independently, and thus it’s a single archive.Ī Backup’s strength lies in speed. Therefore, its checksum regime is the most strict: checksums should always be made of the source, twice, to be sure it was read properly.Įxample: a DIT offloads a card to a RAID drive, and erases the card. It’s about knowing how they were created: from the source.įor Archives, independence is its most important property: each archive on its own must be able to serve back 100% of the data. Having a checksum by itself isn’t useful. Every copy mechanism uses checksums, even Finder. But wait - it’s not just about using checksums. It’s about how they were made, and the only differentiator here is checksums. If you’d simultaneously mount a copy, a backup, and an archive of the same data, you’d get three identical drives. Archives can be a backup, but a backup is not an archive.Īnd sync? Sync is nothing more than an incremental copy. An archive can be the sole copy, or one of many, as long as it by itself lets you recover all data in full, without having to resort to another archive. Archive - a complete replacement of the source.Backed up all your photos on a hard drive, and deleted them from your laptop? That’s not a backup it’s an…

Remember the saying “if a file doesn’t exist in three places, it doesn’t exist”? That’s a backup because it always allows you to recover your data from at least somewhere. You’re expecting the source to not be available at some point in time.

Backup - a duplicate of the source meant for safekeeping.

If you happen to delete an original file, it’s convenient that there’s a copy somewhere, but it never was a requirement in the first place.

Copy - a clone with the sole goal of making it possible to use it in a different location.

The difference lies in what you intend to do with the data: We propose you either have a copy, a backup, or an archive. Let’s make this easier for everyone: A-B-C, easy as 1–2–3… There are simply too many variations and assumptions for a level playing field. An incremental backup can be one that copies all new and changed files (like Hedge does), but for an IT pro, it’s about copying only the changed blocks, with deduplication (think Retrospect). What a DIT refers to as a copy, can be an archive to a data center engineer. To others, it definitely is not, as it lacks a mirror of the OS and is not bootable. Many people, especially ones that never dabble with external storage, consider Time Machine a backup. Semantically, “copying data” is a mess: backup, archive, sync, synch (?), incremental backup, clone, mirroring, and of course, copy all have fluid definitions depending on the use case and user. So, when to use Checkpoint, and then, which mode? Get ready for a deep (13 minute) dive into what backups and archives actually are.👇 Thesaurus Rex Checkpoint now comes with two modes: Backup and Archive. To accommodate better for these pro workflows, we’ve rewritten Canister’s Archiving engine to also work for simultaneous transfers and included it in Hedge as part of Checkpoint, our source integrity engine. However, a sizeable chunk of our users is using Hedge for archiving, data migrations, and other workflows. Hedge’s aim has always been to offer Finder and Explorer usrs a speedier and more reliable copy machine.