Entries tagged with “Backup” from streamline/online

Recommended: Dropbox

By J. on January 9, 2010 5:20 PM |
dropbox_logo_home.pngDropbox has become my replacement for USB thumb drives.  It functions in the cloud, but unlike the iDisk and other remote storage technologies.  Instead of mounting a drive to hold your files, you download and install a small application.  The application places a folder on your desktop, the contents of which are synced to online storage automatically.  Once installed on multiple computers and devices (e.g., the iPhone), you always have your updated files at hand. And when you're on someone else's computer, you can access your files via a web interface.  It's slick, and it's free.  You pay for extra storage space over the first 2GB.

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Recovering Hard Drive Data

By J. on January 8, 2010 7:29 PM |
It was a lovely August morning when my TiBook went bye-bye forever.

I was busy prepping for a presentation when my laptop, which had been a semi-reliable friend for more than six years, shuffled off this mortal coil without even requesting last rites.  I'm no newbie when it comes to assisting electronics as they limp along toward their graves (my graduate assistantship was in electronic music, for goodness sake), so you can take my word for it when I say there was no hope.  None that would have made fiscal sense when compared with a new computer purchase, I mean.

And so I immediately slid over to the Apple web store and purchased a new 24" iMac.  It arrived a few days later.  (And it is, without a doubt, a beauty.  Particularly when compared with my "veteran" laptop.)  Alas, as I was cleaning my desk for its arrival, I made perhaps the most boneheaded move of my life: I picked up the 500GB G-Drive that held my file backups without first powering it down.  Yep, you guessed it.  The bad boy kicked like a handgun as the heads slammed into the spinning platters.  Double-oops.

As you might imagine, I was concerned.  I did have one ray of hope, however.  I was fairly certain the TiBook failure was an electronics issue and not another catastrophic hard drive failure.  I crossed my fingers that I might coax the old laptop drive contents onto my new desktop machine.  Luckily, I turned out to be right.

I hopped over to Best Buy and purchased a Rocketfish 2.5" drive enclosure.  Well, purchased isn't honestly the correct term.  Instead, I utilized what we Once Upon A Time--in a former life as a Radio Shack employee nearly twenty years ago--termed a "30-day free rental."  (If you can't deduce how this might work, shoot me an email.)  The Rocketfish worked like a charm, and all my files were safely on the new machine.  Replacing the guts in the G-Drive and my new backup strategy are topics for another day, however.

I'm torn over what I should do with the TiBook's carcass.  This is the first time I've ever replaced a dead Mac; all my other purchases were upgrades.  I had planned to set up all my old computers--from my Atari 800XL to the TiBook--in the Hobby Room of our new home.  I'm certain I can get my old LCIII (I'd like to use her as a central system for my model railroad) and PowerMac 5200 (perhaps for HyperCard programming and use as a household X10 system) humming again, but the TiBook seems beyond hope.  For now, she's tucked away in my laptop bag, until I buy her replacement.

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New Backup Plans

By J. on April 30, 2007 2:32 PM |

Well, the recent hard drive debacle forced me to reevaluate my backup strategies.  I have developed a three-phase plan.  Two are off-the-shelf Backup 3.1.1 plans, and I created the third from scratch.

Plan One: Personal Data & Settings
This daily plan works in two stages.  It backs up my Address Book, iCal calendars, Keychain, Safari settings, and application preferences to two locations: first to my iDisk, then to my local Firewire drive.  The backups are scheduled 30 minutes apart, though each only takes a few minutes, max.  The purpose(s) of this plan are (a) to keep vital settings in multiple locations, and (b) to keep the number of archived files low for quick recovery in the event of file corruption or accidental deletion.

Personal Settings

Plan Two: Home Folder
As you may recall from the previous entry, the loss of my Home folder was the most catastrophic aspect of the event.  Innumerable documents and all the associated man-hours were lost.  This daily backup will hopefully prevent any such future tragedy.  Some of this is overkill, in that many of the files archived in Plan One will be copied again, but this is meant to be a comprehensive backup for a simple, one-step restore of my Home folder, should the situation arise.

Home Folder

Plan Three: Weekly Comprehensive: Users, Applications, Library
This is the plan I attempted to create last Saturday.  This weekly archive will contain the bulk of my hard drive (minus System files) in case of severe catastrophe.

Comprehensive

Let me hear feedback, if you have any.

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