I've been up to my dreads with crap going on.

Here is one of them, and it is horribly boring geek stuff:

I have a nice desktop machine. It has 4 hard drives. One is my start-up disk (which is getting full and needs to be replaced). The other three are 350gig drives set up as a striped RAID purely for documents and scratch files. This means I basically have a super fast 1TB drive (roughly). Great for recording and doing video work. Also three times as likely to fail.

My HDs are full.

No, there is no pr0n eating up space. It is a legit 1TB of audio (mostly stuff I have recorded), video, documents, etc.

Roughly two months ago I bought 3 750gig drives to replace all of my RAID drives thus doubling my space. Yay! Only problem is I don't have a backup drive to do the swap. I had planned on buying a drobo now that they support Firewire 800, but the prospect of spending nearly $1k on a backup system (since it would need to be able to backup ~2TB) became a non-option as I must be excessively frugal right now.

Last week I broke down and bought a 1TB drive. I abruptly got a gig needing me to work almost non-stop so I couldn't allow the potential day of down time backup up. I waited until this weekend to do the deed.

Friday night I started the backup. Used Carbon Copy to splash all of my RAID onto my 1TB backup drive. I occasionally checked up on it, and then saturday afternoon my computer would only give me the beach ball. After waiting until late saturday with no alteration, I decided to reboot. It still had 30gig left to copy over, so I knew I had to start fresh to cover my ass. Not cool.

Today I had more work to do, so I did it on my old laptop that runs like a dog, has only really old versions of PS/FW/AI/etc., none of my fonts, etc. while I finished my backup.

Sunday evening/Monday morning the backup was finally done. This meant I could yank the three drives, swap them with the three new drives, test them, wipe them, stripe them into a RAID, and prep for the Big Backup™. To save time, I also yanked out my start-up drive, slammed the 1TB backup in as an internal drive, and plugged the start-up drive in as an external USB drive. This way I get the SATA buss speed during my restore onto my newly created 2TB RAID.

That backup is plugging away right now at a good pace. I'm also using SuperDuper! instead of Carbon Copy this time. Carbon Copy was requiring my admin password every other folder copy or so. Pretty sure I have SuperDuper! set up to avoid this headache.

Hopefully when I wake up all will be restored and I'll have my machine back.

Next, I backup my start-up drive, then go get my previous RAID backup drive (which is a 750gig drive) and swap those out.

I have a good chunk of work to do tomorrow that I need my desktop for (recording), so I hope all goes well.


See? That was a boring post. But, I needed to vent a bit.

Tags: geek

Click the image for a great article about dating in parallel rather than serial.

Tags: geek, giggles

I'm doing some Second Life stuff for work at the moment.  Anyone else use it?

Tags: geek

This weekend I will be attending the 22nd annual Hackers Conference. I, again, designed the T-Shirts for this year. Sadly, I am not allowed to show off the design until the conference starts. I think I was able to pull off a pretty cool art deco inspired twisted "T.bias" type logo. I'm anxious to see them when they come in from the printers.

I will be heading over there Thursday night after work since I signed up to help run the registration booth with, you got it, my MOM! It'll be like a big family Super Geek get together.

I'm hoping that my copy of Gears of War shows up before I leave so I can bring my Xbox along for the ride. Even though the official release date is the beginning of next week, Amazon is supposedly shipping orders today. Keeping my fingers crossed.

I'll be seeing a few of you there. Should be a good weekend in the Santa Crüz hills.

Tags: geek