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.

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.

About 18 months ago, our entire household converted to various models of Apple computers. I have been running an external monitor from the DVI connector built into my Macbook Pro since then. All the while, I have been searching for some sort of solution to let me run 2 (or more) external monitors from my laptop. I was excited about the announcement of the ViDock unit from VillageTronic until I found out the Mac version was $499.

In continuing to search this topic last week, I ran across this device that connects an external monitor via USB 2.0. After reading all the reviews, test results and opinions that I could find, I decided to take a chance on one. At $129 for the version that supports the higher resolution, it’s a lot less to invest in something if it turned out not to work as advertised.

The unit arrived yesterday afternoon (Tuesday) and I immediately ripped the box open. I had already downloaded the Mac drivers for it so I ran the install program which forced a reboot at the end of the installation process. Once I had logged back in, I connected the cables to the unit and plugged it into my USB hub. Within a couple of seconds, the second external monitor was working. All I had to do was make a couple of adjustments in the Displays Preference Pane to arrange them as they are arranged on the desk and put the dock back onto the display hooked directly to my DVI port and I was done.

So now, I have my Macbook Pro driving a Samsung 22″ LCD from the built-in DVI port and a Dell 20″ LCD from the USB adapter (and yes I’m champing at the bit to purchase a second Samsung 22″ so that both monitors are the same and everything is symetrical).

I have noticed that the performance of the USB adapter is not as good as the built in card, but that is to be expected due to the bandwidth limitations of USB 2.0. For instance dragging windows has a noticeable “choppiness” to it on the USB monitor vs the built-in one. For this reason alone, I decided to discontinue my use of Leopard’s Spaces function. The way I’m using it now is that I have my Eclipse coding environment set up on the USB driven monitor taking up the entire screen. There isn’t much motion that happens on that screen other than scrolling code up and down or opening the various panels that I use in Eclipse, so the performance is more than adequate to handle that.

The folks that were testing these had 5 of them hooked up to a mediocre Dell Inspiron 9400 driving 5 separate external monitors with the same kinds of results that I’ve noted here. If this continues to work well, I may purchase one or two more and run 3 or 4 screens off of this thing. I had contemplated purchasing a Mac Pro for the desk to get multi-screen capability. This solution saved me over $3,000 so I’m definitely glad that I ran across this link last week.

My Mom had to get a new machine this week after the processor on her old one went out.

Today, while working on one of my daughters’ Macbooks, I screwed up the hostconfig file while trying to edit it with TextEdit (I know, I should have used VI to start with). I should have guessed that TextEdit wouldn’t leave the file without a file extension, but I didn’t.