Dead Ink Vinyl

Ugh. I lost my PB’s hard drive an hour ago. It wasn’t recoverable. OSX froze, which I got miffed about, but when I rebooted the system it shutdown after a long time on the cycling progress circle. Repeated attempts resulted in the same behavior. I pulled out my backup external drive, booted from it, and ran Disk Utility. It tried to repair one file that was reported to be 155TB in size (by setting it to be 0 bytes in size), but that generated a hardware error. The drive could not be erased, either — another hardware error. Finally, I tried repartitioning the drive. That fixed it. Of course, all my data is gone. My last full disk backup was at the end of Februrary. I have a recent-enough backup of my documents and of my mail, but I’ve forever lost some really great photos I took on Friday from my flight lesson and I’ll have to re-purchase some content from iTunes. Of course, I don’t know which content from iTunes was purchased in the last three weeks, except for the Battlestar Galactica episodes.

Grumble, grumble.

So, I’m going to SuperDuper! my backup boot drive to my laptop’s hard drive, then use Backup.app to recover my email, which I had just backed up minutes before the crash. Wish me luck.

Updated 13-Mar-2006 12:15am: Apple’s Backup.app recovered my documents and mail without a hitch. Except that, apparently, it made an incremental backup of my mail to DVD even though it could have made a full backup (it was an empty disk), so I was prompted for the previous DVD backup I’d made to get the process started. I had it, no biggie, but still: feh!

I was shocked when I read Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch’s scathing criticism of Apple’s Backup.app application available to .Mac users. Backup.app is a nice, little program that allows non-technical users a clean interface for backing up relatively small file sets. Backup.app automatically performs full backups if none exist in the destination and incremental backups when a full backup is already present.

I was shocked until I read Jonathan’s summary again: Bottom-line, on top: Don’t use Backup 3. Use SuperDuper or Retrospect. Jonathan, and the horror stories to which he links, were trying to use Backup.app as a replacement for disk backup solutions. One of the stories is from a dismayed user who was having difficulty using Backup.app to recover his entire hard drive. I just shook my head in bewilderment.

From the moment I first opened Backup.app, it was obvious to me that the application is a file backup solution. I call it “my mother’s backup solution”: it’s a convenience for people who don’t want to lose all of their documents if the worst should befall their computers. It archives sets of files—and relatively small ones, at that. The default file sets are iLife files, personal data (Address Book, iCal, Stickies, and keychains), and iTunes purchases (opposed to all iTunes music). Creating custom backup sets is pretty painless and the user can choose from a quick list of non-scary items like “Excel Documents” and “Mail Messages and Settings” instead of drilling to folders.

Recognizing the intended use of Backup.app for frequent backup of small-ish file sets, I use it to backup my personal settings daily to iDisk, and my mail and documents daily to my iPod and weekly to DVDs. I also use it for monthly backup of my iTunes purchases monthly to DVD—just in case. Mostly, I use it as a safety net for the time in between my monthly backups with SuperDuper!.

(I only backup monthly with SuperDuper! because I use a laptop and its a total hassle to hook up the external 3.5″ Firewire drive all the way over there in the other room. I’m only half kidding—backups have to be convenient and unobtrusive for end users to employ them with any regularity.)

So, my bottom line is: Use Backup.app. It’s an excellent compliment to SuperDuper!

It’s been a while, so I thought I’d share some of the projects on which I’m working.

Digital SRL camera maintenance.

I’ve owned a Pentax *st DS for about 6 months now and it’s time I learn the standard maintenance procedures for it. Also, while I’m generally familiar with SLR concepts from my photography classes in high school and college, I’m interested in improving my shots. Thus, I’ve purchased Mastering Digital SLR Photography Understanding Exposure: How to Shoot Great Photographs with a Film or Digital Camera and I’m working my way through them.

Family Tree.

I’m trying to trace my family tree as far back as I can go. I haven’t done any work on this in a long time. I’m using Ancestry.com to perform the searches and Mac Family Tree to store the information. However, I’m looking to switch my software to Heredis Mac X.2 because of the cleaner interface and the ability to export to the common interchange formats.

FileMaker Pro 8.

I’ve found the need for a desktop database. I will be using FileMaker to create and maintain a membership and contact database for one of the organizations to which I belong. I trick to this is not the database, it’s leveraging the tool to create good forms and reports. I want to use the output for creating mailing list labels and the like.

Rules Engines

I’m just starting to look at Drools to create an agent for monitoring a resilient server infrastructure and diagnosing common problems. The goal is to provide a tool for support teams that gives them detailed insights regarding the health and availability of the infrastructure and is able to recognize failure patterns and recommend actions for resolution.

Machine Learning.

I’m still very interested in neural networks and online learning. Wicked Cool Java has some good links to projects in the area of creating intelligent agents. And I’ve been doing some reading on my own.

Newsletters.

I used Apple’s Pages application to create a newsletter for an organization to which I belong. I’ve created a Pages template that I’ll eventually share for others to build from. I’m still tweaking the layout and content distribution based on feedback from the membership.

Private Pilot License

And, of course, I’m learning to fly.

In other news, here is a dump of the topics on which I want to blog when I get the time:

• Backup 3 vs. SuperDuper! (responding to the debate here and here)
• DoubleTake photo stitching (I like it a lot)
• Graphic Converter does not handle Automator nicely for RAW formats
• Dell 3100cn networked, PostScript, color laser printer (I like it a lot)
• potrace rastor-to-vector program (fantastic for B&W)
• disclabel is painfully slow to use – unusage, actually
• Yojimbo (I have it, I don’t understand it’s value, but I didn’t understand QuickSilver for a long time, either and now I can’t work without it)
• ImageMagick (doesn’t handle Pentax PEF raw files

Finally, a list of what I want to see in Pages:

• automatic em-dash, en-dash ; or easy access to them
• When a paragraph is started right of an image around which it flows, it should still be indented

If Swift Publisher does these two things and has nice templates, I’ll switch in a heartbeat.