Silk pants?

9th February

Last few days haven’t been going so well electronically, I’m going to blame silk pants.

First off the input selector went on my 2+ year old amp last Thursday, thankfully my parents took out the extended warranty on it and so that’s back at Richer Sounds, hopefully being sorted as I type. I must admit I do slightly hope that it’s not ‘cost effective’ for them to fix it and a suitable replacement is offered. I doubt it but I can hope.

Second toy to go was the hard drive on my 3+ year old Mac mini. Boy oh boy am I soooo glad that I’m running Leopard now, Time Machine has been a real life saver. Ok life saver is a little extreme but the convenience of being back up and running so quickly with no data lost is, well ideal and perfect. The cost of upgrading to Leopard has been worth every penny and then some.

I must admit I don’t know if Vista or Win7 have a built in backup daemon, for Microsoft’s sake I certainly hope so. Further to that I hope it is as easy to use as Time Machine. Short of my impatience it has been a dream to use.

So the huge downside to a HD crash, losing all the data has been averted but the other downside is finding a replacement drive. Seems the older (P)ATA 2.5″ tech is old enough now to be something of an antique and thus somewhat pricier. Still, I’ve ordered a 160GB drive for about £50 that should see me through until this Mac gets replaced.

So how do I know Time Machine worked so well to back up from?

Thankfully I have a disk lying about from my old laptop that I’ve been able to wedge in until the new disk turns up, phew!

The silk pants? Ok I haven’t got any but heck, got your attention right?

Dan

8 Responses to “Silk pants?”

Toni
11th February 2009
8:22 am

Every edition of windows from ’95 onward (possibly even 3.0 – I can’t remember) has had manual backup software built in. And unlike the 3rd party kind, it has always worked for me. The only issues with it are:

1) whatever you back up is what gets restored. You can’t restore individual files.

2) it’s manual only, so there’s no weekly automated backup, although windows scheduler might be able to do this (I’ve never bothered to investigate – windows really is VERY good and very powerful). It will do incremental and compressed backups.

I have restored a number of machines successfully from the XP version and (I think) one from W98. Time machine looks cool and apparently works too, which is nice. I’ll let you know what I think when the external drive arrives.

Toni
11th February 2009
8:22 am

BTW sorry you’ve suffered ‘macworm’ too.

Dan
11th February 2009
9:40 am

What’s the app? Honestly I’ve never known of a proper backup tool on Windows but it does sound somewhat clunky and I cant imagine too many home users using it.

For me there’s a world of difference between an automated incremental backup piece of software and a manual (albeit regular) tar/zip type of backup. I know and use both everyday which I think for any power/corporate user is the way to go.

Of course the thing with all this software is how good and how quick is it at getting the machine going again.

Toni
11th February 2009
6:17 pm

In XP start/accessories/system tools/backup.

Please tell me you’re kidding about no knowing it was there?

It is very simple to use – desperately easy actually. What it is not is a drive mirror package, so if you trash your system you will need bootable floppies in order to restore the PC. It is also possible to create a virgin windows install and then restore over the top from the backup if you backed up the entire computer, rather than just the data.

But hey, this is windows. Who bothers to back that up?

Yes, there’s a difference between automated backup software and manual software. It’s called a scheduler. ;-) I have used some commercial backup apps and my experience is that they work really well at automated incremental backups, right up until the moment you need to restore. Then, curiously, the windows backup you happened to make is the only one that actually can be recovered. I’m sure there’s some great backup software out there, but for windows, it’s never passed the ‘so what’ test.

My external drive should be here tomorrow – I’ll let you know how I get on with time machine then.

Dan
11th February 2009
6:38 pm

Embarrassingly no… always did simple user copies guess I should have looked a bit harder but then it’s not an issue now, the work laptop is backed up by our corporate system Symantec Endpoint Backup. It’s similar to Time Machine in that in runs in the background and you can rebuild a system from network backups.

Manual software, I heard it was an intern! Seriously one of my tasks is to organize the offsite tape storage every week. But then this is a Unix tar/gz solution, mind you, still runs as a cron job :)

Toni
12th February 2009
12:14 pm

OK, the Tosh disk is here and I’m backing up as we speak.

Time machine is a little easier, as it takes control away from the user and says ‘do you want to back up to this drive, Yes or No?’ So it’s a typical Mac app really, with limited choices and a no-sweat interface. I partitioned the drive in half first (1TB is quite a big drive) with half in FAT32 for the PC and half as Mac OS extended (Journalled). I’ll probably reformat the FAT32 into NTFS when I connect the drive to the PC, since OSX can’t handle NTFS without additional software.

The good – data transfer rate seems acceptable, writing about 800-900Mb/min, which is quite fair for backup across a USB interface.

The less good is that the Macbook case gets quite surprisingly warm during this process. Shouldn’t happen too often though, as it’s a (presumably) full transfer of around 25Gb.

The drive itself is fairly quiet – rather wish I could have got a Samsung drive in a case, but that would take real money. This is about as cheap a 1Tb drive is going to be for a while.

Dan
12th February 2009
3:16 pm

Yeah the initial process can be quite lengthy as it just does a dumb copy of everything, unless you’ve told it to miss anything out.

The NTFS/FAT32/HFS+ is one I keep coming across, what is the best way to move large files from Mac’s to PC’s and back again. MacFUSE seems to be quite good from the little experience I’ve got of it. I think at some point in the future I’m going to go down the NAS route and format the drives with NFS, should sort the problem fine :)

Toni
12th February 2009
5:34 pm

By large files you mean >4Gb (how often do you need to do that?).

BTW I take back my comments about speed being reasonable, with it taking about 1hr20min for 25Gb backup. That’s about twice as long as a similar sized windows backup (based on work I was doing with Lenovos back in June

last year. But hey, it’s done now. The other annoyance is that if you leave the drive connected it seems to ‘have a quick look’ at it every 15 min or so. The idea of 1 hour backup increments is nice in theory, but really annoying when it makes it’s presence felt visibly and audibly every hour. And being Apple, there doesn’t seem a way to change it.

I’m coming to the conclusion that windows sits nicely between Mac and Linux in terms of control. It gives you the ability to control everything that’s important and quite a lot of the stuff that’s pretty, but without being painful about the whole business. And you can do it all without having to buy stuff.

The Tosh drive matches the Macbook very well BTW.

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