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I bought a DDS3 drive for my Sun Blade 1000 on Ebay. Should arrive any day. This is a DAT based tape drive which has a pretty good $/MB rating these days. I prefer DLT, but only when someone else is buying the tapes.
At a modest 12GB native capacity, and rather leisurely transfer rate, it's not something I'm going to be keeping my digital video projects on.
On my Sun machine, however, the main things are my programming projects, my .profile, my .emacs, my CVS repository. This stuff fits nicely in a few gig. I also like the idea of a backup device built-in. So I can put a fresh tape in regularly, use a cron job for the scheduling and have a stack of tapes on top of the machine. If something goes horribly wrong, it will be fairly straightforward to get files back.
For resilience, once I have local backups running, I'm going to do a sort of "cooperative rsync partnership" with a friend who lives uptown (see Eloptoof.Net) and I suppose one DDS tape is no big deal to take Upstate when we next get away for a bit of geographic separation.
Long-term I plan to have a backup server, with a better tape drive,
running Amanda but whilst data is at
risk, a small local tape drive, plus hostdump.sh is a
good first step.
posted at: 22:37 | path: /solaris | permanent link to this entry
Powerbook - return of the life
My Powerbook came back from Apple safe and sound. Hallelujah!
No logic board swap, no new hard disk, just a new superdrive.
I wasn't expecting it this quick (less than one week) and it came superbly packaged - like "I'm going to keep this box" superb. So on the whole I am once again happy with Apple and my investment in AppleCare is definitely showing a big return (I simply knew something had to give eventually given how much work this laptop does).
Any complaints? Well, the CD that jammed wasn't returned. I'm going to assume it was more work to get it out of the knackered drive, so I'll let them off. I also asked for them to look at the latch which is reluctant to trigger, which they don't seem to have done, but I can see that this laptop is basically in good shape for its age and allow it some signs of again.
During the worrying time when I thought the laptop might get damaged and I might lose files I got a bit more serious about backups again. My research led me to favor Dantz Retrospect software plus a stack of Firewire hard drives for backups and standbys. For more details on the reasoning behind this, please see Take Control of Mac OS X Backups - a rather good "EBook" I bought (and no, I wont forward you the PDF, buy your own!).
I need to take a deep breath before committing that much cash (make sure I don't have any other big bills lurking). In the meanwhile, here's the semi-random things I backed up off my laptop :-
And here are the things I didn't backup, that I realised I'd miss after I handed over the laptop and walked off :-
So here's to backups, but also, here's to a hard disk that didn't
fail. "TOSHIBA MK6021GAS" you made my day.
posted at: 22:27 | path: /rescue | permanent link to this entry