So Tuesday night, Allie and I got back from vacation with my family. We spent six days in Colorado and had a really nice time. I didn't know what to expect since I hadn't been on vacation with my parents in about a decade. To thank my parents for taking us on vacation, Allie and I bought them a Canon A720 IS since my mom's old digicam was starting to show its age. More about that later since we're still recovering from everything that happened since we got back.
First, my landlord fixed the heat for good. The last repair to the system was a quick fix to get through the rest of the winter. But he also decided since his heating bills have gone up so much that during the six cooler months when the heat is on, he wants an extra $150 per months to make up for it. My first response was to move, but after looking through craigslist, it turns out that even with this 6 month increase, a better deal cannot be found. It's not the best news, but it's OK. After talking with my landlord, it turns out that depending on cost, he's will to install new windows, run a second circuit and look into more insulation, which should help.
Second, before I left for vacation, I sold my Mac Pro for $2200 with the intention of ordering a $1300 24" refurb iMac upon return. I ran one last Time Machine backup before formatting the Mac Pro and shipping it off to my ebay buyer. When the iMac arrived on Saturday, I plugged the Time Machine drive in and told it to restore. It only ran for a few seconds before it stalled. I restarted the iMac and tried again, this time with the harddrive hooked up directly to the iMac, not through the USB hub built into the keyboard. I got the same result. So I disconnected the harddrive and hooked it up to my G4 PowerBook, hoping to just see the files and copy over my photos and Allison's photos. Didn't even recognize the partition this time.
The rest of this weekend was spent trying various non-destructive data recovery tools hoping that something would work. It's Monday and I've resorted to sending the drive to OnTrack at the referral of MetaFilter. I've been quoted $1000 to $2700 depending on how much data (the drive is 500GB but only contains 171GB worth of data that I want) and how bad the drive is (hopefully not bad since it was working a week ago).
Is it worth $1000? Yes. I was going to sell my 24" monitor and just use the iMac's 24" screen. While glossy and thus full of reflections during the day, is much nicer to look at than my old monitor. A used Samsung 244T sold for $300 or so, so I would actually come out $1200 ahead by downgrading to the iMac, which isn't much of a step down due to the fact that the video card in it is comparable to the one in the Mac Pro in terms of Aperture performance. Aperture also never really stressed the 8 cores (except when doing a large export) so I'm OK with the step down, especially since it was going to save me $1200.
Is it worth $2700? Eh. I can't afford $2700. Allison said she would pitch in whatever she could afford, but I feel bad having her pay for what I consider my fault. Even if I paid for $1800 and she paid $800, I'd still feel horrible. Right now, she's lost a year's worth of photography since she get her DSLR a year ago. It's our vacation to Philadelphia, a few museum trips, family get gatherings and her freelance work for the Long Island Herald. I've lost a little over three years worth, including my trip to Hawaii, our vacation to Philadelphia, a few museum trips and family gatherings. We're really sad about this.
It looks like I will spend at least $1000 on data recovery making this entire thing a wash. It may even have been cheaper to stick with the Mac Pro. Either way the Time Machine harddrive would have died, but it would have died while I still had the original data. There was no click of death nor were there any S.M.A.R.T. failures, so this caught me completely by surprise.
In the future, I'm going to have to keep two backups of everything and rotate one off-site since I can't deal with this again. The cost of a second harddrive to store all our photos on is a small fraction of the cost to possibly recover them.
In addition to my Mac Pro, I now have a 12" Powerbook that I use on the go. Having two computers introduces the hassle of keeping them in sync. Since .Mac comes with a 60 day trial, I decided I'd give it a try. For what it does, it does it well: it kept my mail, bookmarks, calendar and address book in sync, but nothing else.
However, .Mac costs $100 a year and it didn't meet all my needs. It did, however, offer a whole bunch of solutions (in the form of cloud computing) that I didn't want because rather than used someone else's cloud, I'd rather roll my own open source cloud. I don't use flickr, gmail or wordpress.com for this very reason, so why would I want .Mac email, webhosting, galleries, etc? All I really want to do is keep to Macs in sync, including all my documents. I googled and the best I found was Geek Throwdown: How to sync two or more Macs?.
Enter Unison. Here's a quick guide:
rm -rf)..unison in my home directory on my Mac Pro. Inside that directory, I created a file sync.prf. Here's the contents of that file, annotated to explain what each line means:# Roots of synrchonoization
# I want to sync my entire home directory of the Mac Pro, the local machine with
root = /Users/brianpuccio
# ... my PowerBook, hostname beta, the entire home directory
root = ssh://brianpuccio@beta.local//Users/brianpuccio
# This synchronizes file modification times
times = true
# This turns off logging
log = false
# This tells unison to ignore some files and paths
# http://alliance.seas.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/wiki/index.php?n=Main.WikiSandbox
ignore = Name .FBCIndex
ignore = Name .FBCLockFolder
ignore = Name {Cache*,.Trash*,.VolumeIcon.icns,.HSicon,Temporary*,.Temporary*,TheFindByContentFolder}
ignore = Name {TheVolumeSettingsFolder,.Metadata,.filler.idsff,.Spotlight,.DS_Store,.CFUserTextEncoding}
# ~/.fseventsd/ is owned by root, don't have privledges to this, so ignore it
ignore = Name .fseventsd
# Unison is also the name of a usenet client http://www.panic.com/unison/
# This ignores its very large and often changing cache, which is fine since I don't use it on the Powerbook
ignore = Path {Library/Application Support/Unison/news.usenetserver.com}
# This is Mail's cache of my IMAP accounts, since this was large and I kept having Unison crash on the
# first few syncs, I omitted this path figuring Mail on the PowerBook would sync once it went online
# It worked, so I left it alone and in here
ignore = Path {Library/Mail/IMAP-*}
# This is my aperture library and it is too big to fit on my PowerBook (and the PowerBook too slow to run Aperture)
ignore = Path {Pictures/Aperture Library.aplibrary}
# It seems like Unison should automatically ignore its own config folder, but it didn't for me, so I added this
ignore = Path .unisonunison sync (sync because that is the name I cave the preference file, sync.pref.For the most part, it worked. All my files were moved over, my keychain and all its passwords, my browsing history and bookmarks, my Adium settings, accounts and chat histories, my Colloquy settings and chat logs, my dock, my background ... quite literally everything.
There are a couple of issues:
~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dock.plist, ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.dashboard.plistand ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist) are constantly modified by the OS and the very act of logging in to both machines means they both have their timestamps changed, which means Unison doesn't know which one you want to sync to the other, so it displays a ? instead and the default is to do nothing. Of course you can go through each of these one by one (or even en masse) and set that sync to be a Left to Right or Right to Left sync. I'm going to try using the force option and either favor a root explicitly or use the newer option.I will update this as I make improvements.
The computer's behavior seems to be more consistent after waking up from sleep now. Before, the fans would run anywhere from 2 to 30 seconds before the monitor came on or before the hard drives spun up. (edit: if it woke up at all. a lot of times it would just restart.) Now the fans run for about 3 seconds, and the computer takes about 3 more until the monitor comes on.
Hooray. This is why I haven't been sleeping it at night and letting it run.
Apple announced today new Mac Pro's:
Apple® today introduced the new Mac® Pro with eight processor cores and a new system architecture that delivers up to twice the performance of its predecessor*. The new Mac Pro combines two of Intel’s new 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon processors running up to 3.2 GHz, powerful new graphics and up to 4TB of internal storage to offer the ideal system for creative professionals, 3D digital content creators and scientists. The standard 8-core configuration starts at just $2,799.
...
Every Mac Pro comes standard with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT graphics card with 256MB of video memory. The Mac Pro includes a new PCI Express 2.0 graphics slot that delivers up to double the bandwidth compared to the previous generation, and supports the latest generation of graphics cards from NVIDIA, such as the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of video memory, or NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 with 1.5GB of video memory and a 3-D stereo port for stereo-in-a-window applications.
Time to eBay my MacBook Pro tonight and pick up one of these. It will make photo work much much faster. I thought about getting a single 2.8 GHz quad-core CPU and just popping in a second one myself since Apple tends to charge through the nose for components, but apparently, the pricing on the CPUs is quite competitive. Factor in the Mac Pro-specific heatsink I'd need to track down and it isn't actually worth it. (But I'll certainly be doing the RAM upgrades myself.)
I remember when I had a dual Pentium Pro tower and all my friends had CPUs that were much faster, but they were single processor machines. But under load, mine was fine and their mouse pointer's position would refresh every half a second. Since then I've been using laptops for portability, but thanks to my iPhone, I've got the web and email in a much smaller (though often not as convenient) form factor. Since I'm starting to do more photography and dealing with many gigabytes of RAW photos, the horsepower would be a welcome addition.
Besides, if I find I really need a portable computer, and not just a phone, I can run XFCE and Ubuntu on an EEE.
