Time Machine
31 October 2007, late evening
I, like many other people I imagine, went out and bought a new giant hard drive to go along with Leopard. Giant-ass hard drives are pretty cheap now — well, as hard drives go anyway. For $125 (taxes and all) you can buy a half terrabyte drive from Western Digital. I had to pay $45 more for an enclosure. I really wanted to get a firewire enclosure, but SATA to FireWire enclosures are few and far between; the few that I found were quite expensive. SATA to USB 2.0 and/or eSATA enclosures on the other hand are fairly common. eSATA is incredibly fast, but sadly my iMac has no interface for it so I am stuck using USB 2.0, which I’m not a big fan of. That said, USB 2.0 is probably fast enough for a backup drive, so I’ll live. The drive is sitting behind my iMac, making hard drive noises as I type this. It seems to be holding up quite well thus far.
Time Machine seems to work well enough. It does what Rsnapshot was doing, but I have more faith in it than I ever had in Rsnapshot, which would never seem to run rsync without spewing out a lot of errors. Last night I had Time Machine back up everything on my main drive. That was slow. Today I learned you can exclude individual folders on a drive; now the only thing I’m backing up is my User directory. Having hourly snapshots of the system or application folders seemed a bit silly. I can always reinstall the OS and my applications if the system crashes. Not that I want to jinx myself or nothing.
The new hard drive makes loud noises and the blue lights freak me out at night! 8o| I like Galvatron better.
by sh!ma on October 31 2007, 11:18 pm #
Galvatron is much simpler enclosure, that’s for sure. I think the build quality in the new one is nicer though. I can yank out the wire that connects that LED. It’s stupid it doesn’t turn off when the drive spins down.
FYI: I name all my storage devices after Transformers (Decepticons): my iMac itself is Planet Cybertron, my old enclosure is named Galvatron, my new enclosure is named Rumble, my USB key is named Megatron, and my Shuffle is named Soundave. I would have named my two enclosures Scourge and Cyclonus but Icon Factory doesn’t have icons for those two characteres. I also wish they made a Shockwave icon.
by ramanan on October 31 2007, 11:46 pm #
You do know you could make a soundwave icon. Also did you get a firewire 800 enclosure? Does your imac have a firewire 800 port?
by Krishna on November 1 2007, 12:21 am #
Do you know how many questions I get every time I plug in my USB Key into someone else’s computer?! 8o|
My hard drive partitions on my ibook use to be named after doctor suess characters, but then my old hard drive died a slow and painful death. Now I just leave it as is.
by sh!ma on November 1 2007, 7:59 am #
This might be my favorite set of comments on any Funkaoshi post.
by Ben on November 1 2007, 8:59 am #
There are three sets of really great Transformers icons from Icon Factory. I love them. Sadly they don’t have every single Transformer I like. I don’t want to make my own Shockwave icon since it probably wouldn’t turn out as nice.
I’ve been thinking about renaming the iMac to Megatron and my USB key to Starscream. It’s something to think about. (And Shima’s USB key is in fact my USB key.)
Krishna, I updated the post to talk more about the enclosure. I don't have Firewire 800, so buying such an enclosure would be a waste.
by Ramanan on November 1 2007, 10:27 am #
Planet Cybertron should be the domain, at least Cybertron. And then have every dns entry as something else in that domain.
My home network has ea as the TLD, and then arda is my domain.
And then I have
Bombadil .arda.ea (desktop)
Eru .arda.ea (linux server (smb, dns etc))
Melkor .arda.ea (laptop)
My ipod is Melian
I should give my router a proper dns entry (right now it’s just router.arda.ea) but oh well. My xbox used to have an entry too when it was networked but now it’s not even running anymore.
by Iluvitar on November 1 2007, 4:08 pm #