| ??? 04/07/08 17:41 Read: times |
#153019 - I go one further ... and further still. Responding to: ???'s previous message |
Oliver Sedlacek said:
I've evolved the same approach as Craig. The work gets backed up, the OS doesn't. If a workstations dies for any reason, I can keep working on a different workstation while the dead machine gets repaired or replaced. I go one further: I don't even back up the work. Everything I work on gets put into a Subversion repository. The repo is served from a Mac mini in the living room (this machine is also the DNS server and our DVR!). A cron job backs up the repo every night to a network-attached storage disk connected to an Apple Airport Extreme base station. By "work" I mean all projects and project docs. I used to keep my Quicken file in the repo, until I decided that was silly. Now I back it up to the Airport disk and there's always a week's worth of backup (I back up to a directory indicating the day of the week). I use my eMac as my Logic (Apple's digital audio workstation) machine and the audio projects live on a FireWire disk. The projects are cloned to another FireWire disk hooked up to that machine. Completed projects get burned to a couple of DVDs (most projects won't fit on a CD). My vast collection of data sheets and ZIP archives lives on the Airport disk, and my wife uses that disk as her backup. The only flavor of Windows I run at home is XP Home within a Parallels virtual machine on the MacBook Pro. Backing up the whole Windows install is as simple as copying the virtual "disk" image to some place on the network. Project for this week is to resurrect the D-Link NSLU2 "Slug" that runs Debian and connect a big disk to it which will back up the Airport disk. This thing was working fine, with two disks connected (one a clone of the other) until the boot drive crashed. That's when I migrated to the Airport disk for the main backup. Oh, yeah, to make this even more complicated, my wife uses Apple's Time Machine to automatically back up her PowerBook to a FireWire disk. I use Time Machine on my MacBook Pro, too. So in the event of a system crash, I can install a new hard disk in the laptops and then restore the backup from whatever point in time I desire, then keep working. I suppose that restoring from Apple's Time Machine is a heckuva lot easier than reinstalling Windows, then reinstalling apps, then ... Although the whole point is that reinstalling OS X is easier than reinstalling Windows. -a |
