Another Word for Nerd

Got out of bed this morning (I’ve been sick for the past three days), walked into the office, and my external 250G hard drive (a Western Digital combo USB2/Firewire unit) is making “CLACK. CLACK. CLACK” noises. It’s dead.

I lost a bit of stuff obtained via BitTorrent, along with lots of PDF archive documents, some work I’d done scanning a 300-page book to release as a PDF (with the author’s permission), and worst of all, the 40G of scanned comic books I’d collected over the past three years. I have nobody to blame but myself - I had another external 250G disk here that I’d been intending to hang off the Airport Extreme and use for backup for months now, but I never got off my ass and set it up.

After I finished being angry about the dead drive (which was TWO MONTHS out of its one-year warranty), I hooked up the other disk and set up Time Machine to do backups of my internal drive for now.

Thanks to a consulting client of mine, I’ve got two 500G Hitachi SATA disks on the way that should be here early next week. I’ll be putting each of them in a gutted Sun 411 disk enclosure, replacing the internal SCSI bits with a Sabrent USB2 to SATA adapter.

Once those disks are ready, I’ll be dedicating one of them as a Time Machine backup disk, with the other in two partitions; one for “critical” data (will be backed up) and the other for non-critical data (not backed up). The single 500G external for Time Machine should be plenty to keep a “rescue” copy of all the data on my internal (250G) drive and the 250G “critical” external.

This will leave my current USB2-based external 250G disk that I’m using for Time Machine until the 500Gs get here; I’ll either keep it detatched and hook it up once a month for “last ditch” backups, or hang it off the old Dell SC420 in the other room that does nothing but rsnapshot backups of my colocated server in Austin.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 at 2:38 am
Categories: computers, general, opinion, projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.