User Comments

I have to ask, even if it’s slightly off topic: Where DO you get your great illustrations from? Do you draw them yourself?

In other commentary, a good friend of mine couldn’t rid his computer of Windows, being dependant on having to use Flash…

Where DO you get your great illustrations from?

Damn, it’s time to ‘fess up I guess: Image Source

Do you draw them yourself?

Oh if only I had 1/1000000th of that kind of skill! :-(

couldn’t rid his computer of Windows

I haven’t got rid of Windows from my computer Joen. It’s only my servers and firewall that have enjoyed salvation.

However: My day will come!

I have a question, how do you back-up 1.5TB of data - let alone make “two complete backups” of the same?

You borrow four of these from a friend. You also need a lot of time - due to a couple of false starts (and other issues) I’ve spent a week doing back-ups!

Hmmm… viva la revolucion? ;)

You borrow four of these from a friend.

Oh, I’d love to get my hands on a couple of those. After a while of dealing with the absolute nightmare of using DAT tape drives you’re ready to see the light.

How true Diogo. Normally we use DAT too - for incremental backups. But I didn’t want to take any chances at all, hence the disk-to-disk copython.

Things I learned while doing this back-up:

• Attach the “Bigger Disk Extreme” to the host server directly - if that server doesn’t have a Firewire interface then buy one. Trying to copy 1.5TB of data over the LAN is painfully slow, even at 100Mbps - and causes no end of congestion problems.
• Don’t use compression. It’s so much quicker without.
• Do verify the backup - it’s not worth taking a chance on.
• Don’t allow anything to run on the server that is being backed-up, whilst the back-up is taking place.
• Do check the progress of the backup from time to time.
• When copying files from Windows 2000 Advanced Server to a Samba share, Windows will complain that, due to unsupported features of the target file-system, “some files were skipped” - Windows lies, everything was copied successfully (thank you FolderMatch).

Final Note: I spent a couple of hours messing around with config files and TCP/IP settings desperately trying to figure out why I couldn’t access my new Samba shares from my XP workstations… If only I’d thought to actually start the Samba service before I tried connecting to it (doh!) :-(

The Day Will Come, hehe. Well, the thing I like about Linux, is the price tag, a price OSX can’t compete with. As for Google Image Search, trust me, I use that all the time also :)

the thing I like about Linux, is the price tag, a price OSX can’t compete with

True, but let’s turn that around a little:

The thing I like about OS X, is the GUI, a GUI Linux can’t compete with. :-)