So yeah, the whole “pull the hard drives out of the machine and drive them somewhere to have folks try to salvage the data from them” thing has definitely put a monkeywrench in my plans for this week.
It’s now unlikely I’ll get my new releases of Tasks Pro™ and Tasks out this week, among other problems.
Best Case
Thank goodness I was using offsite SVN for everything critical. My guess (hope) is that by the end of this I will have lost only:
- The convenience of already having my desktop machine configured as I like it.
- 2 days of work getting the drives out, back in and restored.
- $400-600 to get all my data back.
Here’s hoping. 
Worst Case
I restore from my most recent full backup from the end of August and I lose any changes that weren’t being sync’ed to some central server. My source code, e-mail, calendaring, contacts and music1 are all safe.
I’d likely lose some digital photos and some source documents (Photoshop and Illustrator files that were used to create various web graphics) and some changes to the King Design web site that I was working on and hadn’t checked in yet.
Lesson Learned
Either way, this has been a sharp wake-up call to get me properly paranoid about my backups again. When I get my drives back, I’ll be setting them up with both internal and external mirrors/backups.
When I first got my Quad, I had an automated backup system in place so I set my drives up as RAID 0 (striped) to get the best performance. After this, I’m changing my tune. I’ll either set them up as RAID 1 (mirrored) or as two independent volumes and use SuperDuper to do a scheduled incremental clone from one to the other.
Most likely, I’ll go the super paranoid route and do both RAID 1 and set up a SuperDuper job to run nightly to external backup drives.
- Thanks to the new iTunes feature that allows purchased music to be transferred between computers via iPod. [back]
Popularity: 4% [?]
Geof F. Morris adds this Comment:
Glad that you’ll be paranoid again; you were the one who drove me to the paranoid state I am now.
I’m certainly there with my Mac mini; I just got the latest Security Update, and the first thing I did upon the restart was a Smart Update from the 500GB external drive that’s my boot drive to the 500GB external drive that purely hangs around as the backup.
This, of course, reminds me that I need to watch sales of 500GB HDs so that I can have a third drive in my closet just waiting for one of these two drives to die a painful death.
And … yes, I strongly suggest your super-paranoid route. I find that running SD at 0330 works the best for me given my sleep schedule.
November 28th, 2006 at 6:31 pm
Chris G. adds this Comment:
Always, always be super paranoid. The cost of doing a proper backup always outweighs the cost of data that is lost.
I have seen far too many clients lose data because they didn’t do proper backups. It is the worst secret about computers…without proper backups, you are just asking for disaster to happen.
November 28th, 2006 at 7:30 pm
Peter Baker adds this Comment:
You made me so paranoid about backups that I put a 4-drive 2TB RAID 5 array in my Quad:
http://treemeat.com/text/32/
http://treemeat.com/[...]IMG_6828.jpg
November 28th, 2006 at 7:31 pm
Kevin Burns adds this Comment:
Raid 5
http://en.wikipedia.[...]/RAID#RAID_5
November 28th, 2006 at 7:41 pm
Alex adds this Comment:
Can’t do RAID 5 with 2 drives.
November 28th, 2006 at 7:49 pm
Peter Baker adds this Comment:
A G5Jive will let you put three more drives in the space in front of the fans: http://www.sonnettec[...]g5_jive.html
Then a ~$100 for a controller card.
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