Leakage from a Cluttered Mind » Computing

Revisiting my computer backup strategy

Phil — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 03:38:58 +0000

Since my disk crash in November of 2009 and subsequent implementation of a disk backup and archiving strategy, I’ve had no further disk crashes. I have, however, followed my backup plan carefully.

OSX Time Machine runs hourly and allows me to recover past versions of files. For a while, I could go back over a year, but lately because of churn of fairly large files, the earliest backup set I can recover goes back about 6 months. An automated clone backup of my boot disk (using Carbon Copy Cloner) runs every evening, and I test that periodically by booting from it. Finally, on a monthly basis I make a clone of my boot disk to a drive that I keep offsite. This is inconvenient, but I like the protection it provides from some types of catastrophe.

I began to realize there were some shortcomings to this plan. First of all, I had no backups for my laptop. Secondly, I foresaw running out of room for my video files (I record a lot of HD and I’m kind of a hoarder). And thirdly I had security risks with the laptop and the archive disk.

I bought one more disk drive and ended up with this configuration:
1 TB OSX Lion boot disk
1 TB backup clone of boot disk
3 TB Media, video, etc
2 TB Miscellaneous, backup of important video
2 TB Time machine backup for desktop and laptop
1 TB core storage encrypted clone of boot disk
320 GB MacBook Pro core storage encrypted laptop

I have about 200GB free on the boot disk, but have 150GB of video files that need to be moved to the 3TB media disk. I have lots of room left on the 3TB media disk, the Time machine backup disk, and the laptop. By the time I run out of room, new disk drives will be available at far higher capacities.

A slight modification to the GalleryView plugin

Phil — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 23:17:23 +0000

To increase the contrast of the titles to white lettering on a dark overlay, I made a very slight modification to the CSS of the GalleryView plugin, which I will document here. I rarely modify WordPress themes or plugins, and usually forget about doing so when I upgrade to a newer release, and then I can’t remember how to fix it again.

In the file
/wp-content/plugins/wordpress-nexgen-galleryview/GalleryView/css/galleryview.css
make the following addition (indicated in red):

/* PANEL OVERLAY CONTENT */

.panel .panel-overlay { color: white; font-size: 0.7em; }

.panel-overlay h2 { color: white; }

.panel .panel-overlay a { color: white; text-decoration: underline; font-weight: bold; }

Two terabytes

Phil — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 04:31:24 +0000

2 Terabytes

My two new 1 TB disk drives arrived today, delivered by the postman and left on my front porch. While they are really nothing special (larger drives are readily available), I am in awe of the technology that can store a million megabytes in a device that basically fits in the palm of your hand.

Energizing the “way-back-machine,” I recall that around 1970 I was writing and running FORTRAN programs on LLNL’s G-machine (the serial number 1 CDC 6600 used for unclassified computing at the time).

CDC 6600
Quick note. The CDC 6600 was a 10 MHz clock machine and would benchmark in the 1 Mflop (1 million floating point operations per second) range. As a comparison, my Mac Pro clocks at 2.8 GHz and achieves 10’s of gigaflops.

125 Gbyte photostore

Anyway, the storage capacity of the computer center (meaning the machines running with classified programs and data) was not very high. I remember the excitement when the lab took delivery of the first IBM 1360 Photostore—the first device able to store a terabit (that’s just 125 Gbytes). Note how many equipment racks it occupied. It was write once technology and its access time was measured in seconds (but it was a whole lot faster than waiting for an operator to go to the tape vault and mount a tape that had your data on it).

Disaster recovery

Phil — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 04:55:49 +0000

Now here’s a tale of woe that actually turned out OK, but there were a few tense moments.

My computer (a Mac Pro) has a 1 TB boot disk and was about 75% utilized. I had a backup strategy that had been partially tested, but I’d never had to use it in a recovery mode. I have a 1 TB external disk dedicated to Time Machine, a nifty incremental backup and recovery system that comes with OS X. I excluded most video files because I didn’t want the Time Machine drive getting filled up with large files that I only keep on the boot disk for a few days. Time Machine runs every hour.

I also have a 320 GB drive that gets a bootable system disk copy once a week. Because it is so much smaller than my system disk, I again excluded a number of folders containing video and other temporary stuff. This backup drive was out of date by a few weeks because when I upgraded OS X to Snow Leopard 10.6, I didn’t want to overwrite my 10.5 backup until I was sure the new update was working well. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn the backup process back on.

That described the state of my backups. Why was that important? Being in the cleaning up and throwing out mood (see the previous post), I cleaned up my “office” and got rid of some dust in and on my computer. I have no idea what bad thing I did, but the Mac refused to boot afterwards. After a bit of unhelpful troubleshooting, I booted from the install DVD and ran Disk Utility to check the hard drives. Bad news. The system disk was damaged and unrecoverable (by Disk Utility). Now, I suppose I could have hunted down better disk recovery utilities, but since I had a current Time Machine backup, I just opted for a full restore from Time Machine.

Some 12 or so hours later (it ran overnight), I had a recovered system disk, although a much leaner one. About 500 GB disappeared in the restore. Now, this wasn’t catastrophic—just inconvenient. After a couple of days of checking the recovered system out, I turned Time Machine back on. Somehow, it figured the system was really different and went into a time consuming backup. Twenty or so hours later, it said everything was resynchronized. One nice thing about the Mac Pro is that it has enough CPU power and bandwidth that backups have a negligible impact on normal operation.

I learned a couple of things. First of all, it’s better to have a bootable image backup drive that is the same size as the system drive. I’ve ordered another 1 TB drive for that purpose.

Second, I shouldn’t worry about the Time Machine drive filling up with “temporary” files. It knows how to handle that, and will purge the oldest backup files as necessary to make room for new files that need to be backed up.

Third, and my most serious shortcoming, I have no archive. I have data (like photos, family videos, financial data) that I don’t want to lose. It has value not only to me, but to my heirs. I’ve ordered an external e-sata adapter (and another 1 TB drive) that you can just drop an e-sata drive into. I’ll schedule a monthly image copy to it, and then figure out how to safely and conveniently store that drive outside the house. I’m not exactly sure how that will work—safe and convenient seem opposed to each other.

The time is 1234567890

Phil — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 23:31:20 +0000

Here’s a geeky thing on this Friday, the 13th. This computer’s internal clock (based on Unix epoch time) just hit 1234567890. It does the same thing on my desktop running OS-X.

RP:~ phil$ perl -e 'print scalar localtime(1234567890),"\n";'

Fri Feb 13 15:31:30 2009

Unix time is defined as the number of seconds that have elapsed since midnight Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) of January 1, 1970, not counting leap seconds. Those who think it’s cool to watch the odometer in your car reach 99,999 might enjoy this tidbit. Otherwise, have a nice day!

From a mouse to a light pen

Phil — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 00:47:18 +0000

While I’m remembering things from 40 years ago I thought I’d write a little more about working on the PDP-1 computer. While debugging the mouse interface I wrote about previously, I added a small enhancement to the light pen. The original light pen simply set a hardware flag when the pen detected light as the point was being painted. The software had to continually poll the state of this hardware flag to check if the light pen had detected anything. This was inefficient. I simply added a few gates and some control circuitry to request an interrupt when the pen detected light. This took the polling instructions out of the display loop, and on a slow computer like the PDP-1 meant more points could be displayed before flicker set in.

My first mouse

Phil — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 18:26:14 +0000

Some say the ubiquitous computer mouse was born 40 years ago in 1968 when SRI researcher Douglas Englebart demonstrated, in what author Steven Levy called “the mother of all demos,” not just a kludgey wooden-cased mouse, but the system of user interactivity based upon it. However, I can say with authority that the mouse had escaped Englebart’s Augementation Research Center some months before.

Lawrence Livermore's PDP-1 installation

In September 1966 I began working at my first job after grad school. I hired into the engineering group supporting Lawrence Radiation Lab’s computer center with visions of working on the supercomputer (for the time) time-sharing system being assembled. My boss, Bob Wyman, however, gave me a wire-wrap tool and pointed me at the PDP-1 with the goal of designing and building an interface to a mouse George Michael was having built. George had seen Englebart’s work, and wanted a mouse to “play with.” My assignment was to design a two-channel A-D converter to digitize the x and y analog signals for the two potentiometers in the mouse. I don’t recall how long this took, but I think I made a good showing with my first project. For sure, the mouse was functional on the PDP-1 in early 1967.

Not long after I completed the mouse interface I transferred to a smaller engineering group supporting nuclear chemistry labs, so I’m not sure how much the mouse was ever used on the PDP-1, and getting all wrapped up in the laboratory automation that minicomputers ushered in, I paid no more attention to the user interface issues that Englebart was pioneering.

In 1984, the mouse became a permanent fixture in my personal computing environment when I bought an Apple Macintosh.

Another spammer takedown

Phil — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:46:14 +0000

Ars Technica reports the spam oriented ISP McColo has been grounded due to some great work by The Washington’s Post Security Fix blog team. This data from SpamCop shows it had a big effect. Who knows how long it will last though.

Proof of the Now Generation

Phil — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 23:28:14 +0000

Many folks are celebrating the release of the iPhone 3G next month as a great price drop. The 8GB iPhone drops from $399 to $199, and you get the higher speed (if you use the phone in a 3G network area—generally large urban areas). Few look beyond the initial buy-in cost and calculate the total cost of ownership.

Unless you jail-break your phone, the iPhone in the US is locked-in to a 2-year contract with AT&T. The minimum plan with the current model phone is $40 per month for voice and $20 per month for data (and includes 200 SMS messages per month). That’s $1,440 for the service and $400 for the phone, totaling $1,840 TCO for the current iPhone. But the new, less expensive 3G phone requires a 2 year contract that costs $30 per month for data, and doesn’t include any SMS messaging. Although not announced yet, adding 200 SMS messages to the iPhone 3G plan will probably cost $5 per month. So guess what, the TCO on the new iPhone will be $2,000 ($200 for the phone and $1,800 for the service).

None of this is to say that the new iPhone isn’t worth $160 more to the user. With its new features, it probably is. The point here is that the better acceptance of the new iPhone because it only costs $199 instead of $399 illustrates the “get it now” attitude of our culture and the unwillingness to deal with total costs as long as the monthly costs can be squeezed into the budget.

Update: Gizmodo has a good price comparison.

A small upgrade

Phil — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 23:20:04 +0000

–>
The upgrade was not exactly painless. I couldn’t get the old G4 to mount the boot volume in firewire mode, so I had to use a complicated migration process. Somewhere in that process I messed things up (I think). Almost everything works fine, but some applications still want to reference files on the old G4 (like Photoshop Elements).