Showing posts with label timemachine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label timemachine. Show all posts

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Restoring OSX, backups are great

well my mac pro was running happily since january 2008 on a raid 10 configuration without any major issues. Sure it forgot it's keyboard from time to time and once a week I have to recharge all batteries. But otherwise it was the most reliable pc I ever had.

The wonderful timemachine software also did it's best to keep my backups up to date. So I never worried about a thing.

Till 2 harddrives started to report read/write errors 2 weeks ago. So I ordered a couple of new harddrives (500Gb x 4, I need speed and not space on this thing, and they are supposed to be nearly as fast as velicio raptors) To replace them.
At the time I noticed that I need more speed and 200mb/s write speed is just not fast enough for my stuff. So I decided to replace all 4 old harddrives with the 4 new ones in a raid 0 configuration.

I like to live risky? Sure, but I got backup's and timemachine is a great piece of software to restore a system...

Ok the idea was nice, but it turned out that you have to boot from the original osx cd to get timemachine to restore the complete system.

So plan B was on the table, let's call superduper to the rescue and use timemachine only for archiving my data.

Basically superduper generates a complete image of my system on an external harddrive and if my system fails, I can boot this HDD, keep working, while my system restores in the background.

And it only cost 27$ and makes live so much easier for me.

My new backup plan?

  • hourly timemachine archives
  • weekly super duper images