Dan’s Drivelings

In response to a call for opinions on NAS devices by Dan Wilson, Oğuz Demirkapi and I exchanged a few tweets regarding RAID and backups and how we each use them to try to ensure we don’t experience any data loss. It’s hard to explain this type of setup in 140 character chunks, so I thought I’d do a quick post outlining my current setup and what I want to do to tweak it in the near future.

Our house is a total Mac household. I have a 17″ Macbook Pro, my wife has a black Mackbook, the twins each have a white Macbook and we have a Mac Mini that sits in a room in the basement and serves as a “server” for the house–iTunes and Calibre servers plus DVR functions with an Elgato EyeTV 250 Plus. The mini streams iTunes content to all the above-mentioned computers plus two AppleTV units.

For file storage, I have an original-model Drobo hooked to the Mac Mini. We store everything from files used in our business, the iTunes media library, the Calibre eBook library, the centralized iPhoto library and more on there.

Current Backup Components

1. Hourly backups: Each of our computers has Time Machine configured to do hourly backups to a 1TB Time Capsule
2. Nightly backups: I’ve installed the Mac client for the Mozy online backup service on the Mac Mini. Each night it backs up anything on the attached Drobo that has changed except for music and movie files. This ensures that our business files, photos and other files get backed up daily as they change. I originally had the movies and music set to back up there too, but it took entirely too long through the limited upload speed of my cable modem for large HD movies to get backed up
3. Monthly backups: I keep a Western Digital MyBook that has two 500GB hard drives (configured to be a total of 1TB) in a safety deposit box at our local bank. About once per month, we bring that drive home, sync all the data on the Drobo to it and return it to the safety deposit box. This ensures that there is at least a relatively recent copy of the media files stored somewhere outside my house in the event of a disaster

Holes in my setup
Eventually, I’d like to move the Time Machine backup targets to point to a partition on the Drobo. It has 4 drive bays that can each handle 4TB SATA drives (when those become available) so it potentially has the capacity to do everything it’s doing now plus store what we’re putting on the Time Capsule. Doing that would give me redundancy for the backups that Time Machine creates unlike using the single drive in the Time Capsule today.

Additionally, the 1TB MyBook drive is, at some point, going to be insufficient to mirror the contents of the Drobo. I’ve been thinking about what to do when that happens. I’m considering purchasing another Drobo unit, mirroring the files from my current Drobo onto it, and placing it on the network at my brother’s house (which is about 150 miles from me). I could then use CrashPlan to mirror any changes to that remote Drobo. That would let me remove the Mozy subscription while keeping a complete set of files outside the house.

I realize this is not the most comprehensive backup strategy known to man, but I think it balances automatic, hands-off backup with off-site redundant storage to recover in the event of a disaster.

I’m also sure there are other great ideas out there and I’d love to hear how you folks solve this problem for yourselves.

One of the things that I’ve missed greatly since moving to using a laptop as my primary machine just over 3 years ago is the ability to run multiple monitors. My old tower machine had a pretty hefty video card (for the time) in it that had both DVI and VGA connectors built in. At the time, I ran twin Dell 17″ LCDs off that card and loved the advantages that having twice the screen space gave me.

That all changed when I bought a Dell 17″ laptop and started using that as my primary machine. While you can leave the laptop open and use the internal LCD screen with an external monitor attached to the monitor connector, that configuration has never suited me well. I have this “condition” that things I deal with on a regular basis need to be symetrical (my wife thinks I should be in therapy for it, I think it’s just a matter of wanting things to look “right”), so having a laptop open next to an external monitor just never appealed to me.
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This is a quick post as much to remind myself the next time I need it as anything about how to start and stop MySQL from a terminal window on OS X.  When you install MySQL it defaults to auto starting at login.  I like to have control over when the services that I use for development are started and stopped–hence I start Apache 2, ColdFusion and PostFIx from a terminal window when I’m getting ready to work.  Until today, I had just lived with the fact that MySQL started automatically when you logged in.  I finally got off my lazy butt and decided to do some searching on the command-line syntax to start and stop MySQL.

As is generally my luck, it’s taking me longer to write this post than it did to find the answer in the “new evil empire” (that’s Google for those of you like me that haven’t joined the anti-Google bandwagon yet). The commands are pretty straightforward but it’s still nice to set up an alias in your terminal profile so you don’t have to remember them. They are:

sudo /usr/local/mysql/support-files/mysql.server start
sudo /usr/local/mysql/support-files/mysql.server stop

I set an alias for each of those in my .bash_profile so I only have to type mysql-start and mysql-stop respectively.  The only other thing you’ll want to do is remove the startup item from /Library/StartupItems with the following command:

sudo rm -rf /Library/StartupItems/MySQLCOM/

Many thanks to this blog post on the “explorer’s club” blog (specifically steps 3.3 and 4.3) for getting me on the right track.

I absolutely love Time Machine with Time Capsule!  Time Machine by itself was cool enough when I was using it with an external drive on my desk. The only problem with that scenario is that everyone in our house had to have their own external drives for backup.  I have a MacBook Pro, we have a Mac Mini sitting in the “server room” in the basement, and my wife and twin daughters each have their own Macbooks.  So, as you can see, that would be a lot of external drives to buy/maintain.

Now with Time Capsule, I can point Time Machine to the drive inside there and all our machines get backed up automatically to one central point in the house.  Since my wife doesn’t spend much time with her machine hooked up at our desk and since the twins are almost never at a desk at all, having a Time Capsule allows their machines to be backed up no matter where they are in the house.

I purchased the 1 TB Time Capsule and, even with all 5 machines backing up to it, we’ve used only about 160GB of space over the last 3 weeks or so of use (and of that, over 150GB of that was for the initial backup).  At that rate, I expect us to be able to back all our machines up to the Time Capsule for many, many months.

Time Machine isn’t the “be-all, end-all” for backup though.  For us, it’s one side of a two-pronged backup strategy.  I also use Mozy’s off-site backup service to back up files nightly to a place outside the house. I once lost a TON of photos and business files because I didn’t understand the importance of backups. Because of that, I’ve decided that you can never really be “too backed-up”.

Ok, so maybe that’s stretching it a little bit.  BUT, one year ago today I took delivery of my new Apple Macbook Pro. I continue to be just as impressed with it now as I was the day I wrote the first blog post about it.  Looking back, it doesn’t seem like it’s been a year since I got it.  Since that time we’ve converted every other member of the house to Apple notebooks (a black Macbook for my wife and white Macbooks for each of my twin daughters), added a Mac Mini with a 1TB Western Digital MyBook external drive to be the central media server for the house, and two AppleTV units (not to mention several iPods and a couple of iPhones).

All in all, I’m very pleased with our switch to “Mac land”. Things are stable and I’ve had to devote much less time to administering machines than when we were all on the Windows platform. The only thing we’ve come across that we’ve really had to change how we do things is we had to move away from using the online version of Quickbooks to run our business as it is dependant on ActiveX controls that only work in MS Internet Explorer.  We ran it in a Windows XP virtual machine via VMWare for a while, but that turned out to be a real hassle so we moved to the native Mac version of Quickbooks.

I’m still trying to get my wife to come around to the idea of me growing a pony tail though so I fit in with the whole Mac stereotype though…..