I probably won’t be around for any project for a while. The reason for this is that a series of repeated hardware failures are wreaking my nerves and I came to the point my health is at stake again, since I was already worried enough about that.
Two weeks ago my mother’s iBook started to misbehave (Safari crashing out of the blue and stuff like that), so I decided to replace it at the first chance; I ordered for her a MacBook 13” (white) and went on with life. A few days later, my MacBook Pro failed to find the hard drive, logic board has to be replaced, but the Apple tech support in Padova is quite stupid (more to that in the near future, just so that I can put some bad advertising for a very bad support centre).
Since I needed access to QuickTime for a job task I ordered quickly an iMac, with my extraordinary hardware fund (already depleted by the harddisks bought last month); I wasn’t happy about the thing but job is job and I needed the box.
Today the last straw, after yet another blackout (and I don’t live in California), my iomega drive failed again, the first time was in November, I hard the drives in RAID0, I lost tons of data, but nothing really important, I had to re-rip some of my music and that was it. This time it was in RAID1, but still it’s a HUGE problem because it is the only working backup of the MacBook Pro, and I wanted to use that to restore the iMac with my MacBook Pro preferences.
Now I’m copying over my music on Yamato’s WD drive, and hopefully I can go from there to export the timemachine data in some way that can be actually used by th iMac install process.
But I’m not happy, not happy at all.
I’m now trying to define a backup strategy for my systems, mixing redundancy, replication, and simple backup to make sure the data loss is minimised. It’s not exactly fun, and will likely require me the whole week even to _try_ enacting it, but hopefully once I’m done I can sleep better at night.Right now my idea involves three operating systems, a lot of cabling and at least €100 worth of new hardware. I’m now dividing by level the importance of data on disks.If I could get a discount on Sun’s storage solutions that could certainly help. Lacking that I’ll have to work ito ut with Solaris 10 on my old Enterprise if it works, and give up using that for *BSD and OpenSolaris testing. On the other hand qemu+kvm might work just fine.
I have now reduced @/home@ to 8GB, and moved it to RAID1 (next step is to set it up to be backed up weekly); @/@, @/var@ and @/usr@ are now merged together in a single @/@ partition which is also RAID1. @/var/cache@ (with distfiles) and @/var/tmp@ are split off.Now I just need to finish migrate my stuff and set up proper backing up scripts.
Make sure you document it please.