New Obsession: Backup & Technology
It's classic. I suffer a huge loss and now am obsessed with backing up everything. I'll digress technical, but since I've long abandoned my original format for this blog (day to day film operations), I'll say whatever I want.
Retrospect is a great program. A little pricey, but it does the job.
Right now I have Retrospect Desktop Backup 5.1 running on the Mac. It's set to run nightly at 12am, backing up the entire Users folder, which contains all my documents, as well as my wife's and miscellaneous work thingys. The key is to have another Hard Drive to backup to. I realized my old reluctance to backup was spending 2,3 hours feeding the machine DVD-R discs, essentially keeping me home on my days off (Trust me, when your regular work week is 50+hours staring at two computer screens, you want to unplug on the rare weekends!) I purchased a 250GB EZ Cobra Firewire 800/USB 2.0 portable harddrive from a co-worker for around $250. Now it is our main backup drive. Every 2 weeks the schedule is set to recycle the backup (rewriting it from scratch) and every month I spend the time to backup to DVD-Rs. Hopefully this will be the new pattern and help me in the event of another catastrophic crash.
The neat thing I'm next trying is Client backups. Retrospect ships with two client licenses. What this means is that if it works, The same Macintosh nightly will connect to my server box and laptop - backing up both of them. If all goes well, I'll have a 'backup server strategy' which will be safe, cool and utterly 'King of the Geeks'.
Which makes me realize how much silicon I'm pushing these days. So for my benefit as well as the boredom of others, here's the list of big iron we have in the Loyd household.
1. PowerMacintosh G4 - Dual 1Ghz. This is the editing machine, and is currently being rented to the show I'm working for. It's pretty sweet, though now eclipsed by the new G5's. I hope to have a few more shows with it, then retire it mainly for home use and ProTools audio editing (for which it is more than adequate).
2. PowerMacintosh G4 - 400Mhz. The old editing box, I cut the DVD's of 'Predator', 'The One', 'First Blood' and 'Rambo' on it. I also produced and recorded a 3 song demo for Lila on it. It's the 'Main Mac' now that the Dual 1Gig is working, and it houses all 80GB of music for our iPods (though a lot was lost in the crash). My plan is to migrate this to a backup server only.
3. "Frankenstein PC" - Home built AMD 1.2Ghz beige box. It runs Windows 2000 Server and hosts the Loydwerks domain. Loydwerks is basically a repository for reviews and photos too big to go on my main webpage, Daniel.Loyd.com, which I rent. It also has a FTP server, which is a blast. Being able to access anything you want at any internetconnected computer is great. And it has a Filemaker Pro server, for my tape logs. Problem is the Win2K installation, which 'freezes' every so often. My plan is to migrate it to Red Hat Linux within 2 months.
4. "The Wife's Dell" - Nice Optiplex 800mhz P3. The wife's computer. I am not allowed to touch it. My tales of how the Mac got crashed should be an indicator why.
5. My Laptop - Dell 333Mhz Latitude. A workhorse, an OLD workhorse, but a good laptop for me nonetheless. I'm writing this on it and it's been my mobile office/writing desk/ and email machine for over 2 years now. I'm looking to upgrade to those nice new shiny Powerbooks, but not yet. BTW, the BEST writing /research program I have every used is MyBase from Wjjsoft.com. It's free to try and $50 to buy. Worth every penny. It's a database program that mimics windows heirarchical folder view. I place my headings on the left, and when I click on them, the data shows up in the window on the right. In one file I have story ideas on the left and the various thoughts contextualized underneat. And it stores webpages straight from explorer (but not Mozilla, Wah!). The best thing is with all this info in it, the file is incredibly small and the program incredibly fast. This is the ONE program that has made me hesistate switching over to a Mac laptop (and I'm an avowed Mac-head). I've been lobbying the company to do an OS X port and they've done a linux one that I've been messing with (Mac OS X being a unix variant like Linux.)
6. The Wife's laptop - again, I don't touch. She's got a slambaked brand new Dell latitude P4 2.4 ghz monster laptop. Too frickin heavy, but the best machine in the house probably.
The Rest: Two ipods, two palms (barely used now), 3 monitors and a few old Jaz drives.
There we go. Too much technology. Hopefully I can transisition the server and the backup server to rack-mounts to save space. As we've been wrapping our heads around living in Venice, CA, space is a premium. So....simplify....
Retrospect is a great program. A little pricey, but it does the job.
Right now I have Retrospect Desktop Backup 5.1 running on the Mac. It's set to run nightly at 12am, backing up the entire Users folder, which contains all my documents, as well as my wife's and miscellaneous work thingys. The key is to have another Hard Drive to backup to. I realized my old reluctance to backup was spending 2,3 hours feeding the machine DVD-R discs, essentially keeping me home on my days off (Trust me, when your regular work week is 50+hours staring at two computer screens, you want to unplug on the rare weekends!) I purchased a 250GB EZ Cobra Firewire 800/USB 2.0 portable harddrive from a co-worker for around $250. Now it is our main backup drive. Every 2 weeks the schedule is set to recycle the backup (rewriting it from scratch) and every month I spend the time to backup to DVD-Rs. Hopefully this will be the new pattern and help me in the event of another catastrophic crash.
The neat thing I'm next trying is Client backups. Retrospect ships with two client licenses. What this means is that if it works, The same Macintosh nightly will connect to my server box and laptop - backing up both of them. If all goes well, I'll have a 'backup server strategy' which will be safe, cool and utterly 'King of the Geeks'.
Which makes me realize how much silicon I'm pushing these days. So for my benefit as well as the boredom of others, here's the list of big iron we have in the Loyd household.
1. PowerMacintosh G4 - Dual 1Ghz. This is the editing machine, and is currently being rented to the show I'm working for. It's pretty sweet, though now eclipsed by the new G5's. I hope to have a few more shows with it, then retire it mainly for home use and ProTools audio editing (for which it is more than adequate).
2. PowerMacintosh G4 - 400Mhz. The old editing box, I cut the DVD's of 'Predator', 'The One', 'First Blood' and 'Rambo' on it. I also produced and recorded a 3 song demo for Lila on it. It's the 'Main Mac' now that the Dual 1Gig is working, and it houses all 80GB of music for our iPods (though a lot was lost in the crash). My plan is to migrate this to a backup server only.
3. "Frankenstein PC" - Home built AMD 1.2Ghz beige box. It runs Windows 2000 Server and hosts the Loydwerks domain. Loydwerks is basically a repository for reviews and photos too big to go on my main webpage, Daniel.Loyd.com, which I rent. It also has a FTP server, which is a blast. Being able to access anything you want at any internetconnected computer is great. And it has a Filemaker Pro server, for my tape logs. Problem is the Win2K installation, which 'freezes' every so often. My plan is to migrate it to Red Hat Linux within 2 months.
4. "The Wife's Dell" - Nice Optiplex 800mhz P3. The wife's computer. I am not allowed to touch it. My tales of how the Mac got crashed should be an indicator why.
5. My Laptop - Dell 333Mhz Latitude. A workhorse, an OLD workhorse, but a good laptop for me nonetheless. I'm writing this on it and it's been my mobile office/writing desk/ and email machine for over 2 years now. I'm looking to upgrade to those nice new shiny Powerbooks, but not yet. BTW, the BEST writing /research program I have every used is MyBase from Wjjsoft.com. It's free to try and $50 to buy. Worth every penny. It's a database program that mimics windows heirarchical folder view. I place my headings on the left, and when I click on them, the data shows up in the window on the right. In one file I have story ideas on the left and the various thoughts contextualized underneat. And it stores webpages straight from explorer (but not Mozilla, Wah!). The best thing is with all this info in it, the file is incredibly small and the program incredibly fast. This is the ONE program that has made me hesistate switching over to a Mac laptop (and I'm an avowed Mac-head). I've been lobbying the company to do an OS X port and they've done a linux one that I've been messing with (Mac OS X being a unix variant like Linux.)
6. The Wife's laptop - again, I don't touch. She's got a slambaked brand new Dell latitude P4 2.4 ghz monster laptop. Too frickin heavy, but the best machine in the house probably.
The Rest: Two ipods, two palms (barely used now), 3 monitors and a few old Jaz drives.
There we go. Too much technology. Hopefully I can transisition the server and the backup server to rack-mounts to save space. As we've been wrapping our heads around living in Venice, CA, space is a premium. So....simplify....
posted by DLoyd76 at 4/30/2004 10:03:00 AM
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