Dead Ink Vinyl » superduper

Dead Hard Drive [Updated]

dlkinney — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 05:16:00 +0000

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!

In Defense of Backup.app

dlkinney — Sat, 25 Feb 2006 22:56:00 +0000

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!

Projects

dlkinney — Sun, 19 Feb 2006 04:34:00 +0000

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.

New Laptop Hard Disk

dlkinney — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 06:20:00 +0000

I am writing this entry from my newly upgraded PowerBook with a 7200rpm 100GB hard disk. I have pictures to prove the tale — I’ll post them later. The PowerBook works like a charm. I love it so far. The computer certainly boots faster than ever and launches multiple applications simultaneously faster than ever. I haven’t put the PB through its paces yet, though.

Anyway, I want to thank the team at PB FixIt — they did a great job with their walk through. Their instructions were dead-on for disassembling my laptop.

I would add just three small items to those who may follow in my footsteps. The first item sounds pretty brain-dead, but is easy enough to forget as a PowerBook owner: shutdown the laptop before starting. This is worth mentioning because as a Mac user I’ve grown so comfortable with the Sleep mode that I think “sleep = off”. The other thing I would note is on page 6: the orange cables are disconnected from the motherboard by pulling straight up. I didn’t enjoy having to guess at something like that with a very expensive motherboard at stake. Finally, the guide needs to mention that when you’re attaching the upper case (keyboard, trackpad, et al) you want to make sure the trackpad ribbon (from page 3) is properly positioned through its slot or you won’t be able to reach it when it’s time to plug it back in.

And you need to plug in the “trackpad ribbon”. It turns out that the “trackpad ribbon” isn’t just for the trackpad. It’s for everything on the upper case that needs to talk with the motherboard: keyboard, trackpad, and power button. I happened to have missed this step and my PowerBook was a brick when I was done assembling it. A brick. A paperweight. It didn’t work. It didn’t start. It didn’t do anything. I pressed the power button and… nothing. Not a whir, a light, nor a chirp. Absolute nothing. It is a very eerie sensation, followed by a little bit of panic. I did figure out pretty quickly that I’d skipped a step in my rush to enjoy my new system, and then discovered that I had to go all the way back to pulling off the upper case to fix my oversight. I hope I’ve saved you that trouble. Now you know what to look for first if your PowerBook won’t start after a hard drive replacement or upgrade.

I dropped the old 80GB disk into a MacAlly 2.5″ Firewire enclosure. The enclosure really impresses me. I also own standard size enclosure from MacAlly and I think very highly of both products. The 2.5″ is a really solid piece of work. I read some reviews that bad-mouthed it because it doesn’t come with a DC power adapter, which is needed when running from USB. However, the drive does come with a second USB cable that plugs into the DC power port, so you just need to plug that into a powered USB port to pull the necessary power to run the drive. (Since USB sucks, it doesn’t bother to provide enough power on its own.) Of course, if you simply use the Firewire connector, all the necessary power is pulled from that and you don’t need to fool with any of this USB nonsense.

I booted from a different Firewire drive that had an old image of my main disk, then used SuperDuper! to clone the old 80GB drive onto the new 100GB drive and rebooted. (I’m aware of CCC, but I find SuperDuper! sufficiently superior to CCC that I’m willing to pay for the utility.)