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.
Enter OS X 10.5.2 and, according to Apple, the problem is solved. Time Machine will now happily back up your Aperture database (both Aperture 1.5 and 2) without a problem. That sound you hear is thousands of Aperture users breathing a sigh of relief.
If you think Time Machine backs up too often (or not often enough) for your liking, navigate into /System » Library » LaunchDaemons. There you'll find a file named com.apple.backupd-auto.plist. Open it in your favorite text editor, and look for this section:
<key>StartInterval</key> <integer>3600</integer>Change the 3600 number to some other time interval in seconds, and you'll have changed Time Machine's backup interval.
I need to investigate the comment at the bottom that says it should be possible to configure when Time Machine runs, ideally 4:00am daily.
I've been digging into how Apple got Time Machine to work on OS X. I've been using it for two weeks (as opposed to my old rsync the /~ directory solution because I was too lazy to implement a versioned solution) and find it works as advertised so far. My one concern is how Time Machine handles files that change a lot, but in very little ways. First, it's worth pointing out that Time Machine uses what Linux users call hard links:
Backup systems typically make a full clone backup, and then copy only the differential or incremental changes. Differential backups capture everything that has changed since the last full backup, while incremental backups only copy what's changed since the last partial backup. Full backups obviously consume too much disk space to do every hour, but differential or incremental backups don't capture the whole picture in a single shot. Time Machine appears to do both: capture full backups every hour without taking up all the disk space this would require. How does it do this?
An intelligent backup system using differential backups would also have to parse all the various backups done in order to present a composite view of all the partial backups to present the user with the files that can be restored at any given time. The user might want the version of a file from two hours ago, or from two weeks ago. Accommodating this kind of flexibility typically requires managing a complex database of backup file transactions. If that metadata database is lost, restoring files from the backups becomes far more complex, and requires an arduous and lengthly rebuilding of the database.
To solve both problems, Time Machine does something new and different that actually required Apple to make changes to the underlying Mac file system, HFS+. The new change is referred to multi-links, which are similar to "hard links" common to Unix users and potentially available when using NTFS on Windows. Hard links differ from "soft links" (also known as symbolic links), which simply act as placeholders pointing to another file.
Now let's say I've got a large file, such as my iTunes library XML file. Right now it's about 2MB and growing. If I add one track to my library, that file changes and the next backup that is run, the file gets copied over, in it's entirety, to the backup drive. A 2KB change is requiring 2MB of space. I understand that significant resources would be needed to restore a file if it were modified dozens of time. But you're not restoring files daily, you eating up more drive space daily.
I also know that 2MB aggregate over a year isn't going to kill you. But the same would happen to large files. Granted, most people aren't going to be editing large files (read: multimedia), and if they were, one would hope that they'd exclude that directory and manually backup or turn Time Machine off while doing such work. (Don't forget to exclude things like your BitTorrent directory, which would contain constantly changing large files.)
But what if you use encrypted disk images to secure your data? Each DMG file is treated as one big file by Time Machine which means if you have a DMG file that has 100 MB of data and you add a 1 MB image to it, Time Machine will recopy the modified 101 MB DMG file in its entirety and leave the 100 MB DMG file available in all the old backups. It would be great if Time Machine could interact with DMGs on a more advanced level, rather than treating them like simple files. If you only have one or two DMG files with sensitive information, this isn't so bad. But if you use File Vault, your entire home directory is a big fact encrypted DMG.
Certainly worth noting is that the Linux camp has been using things like rsync and rdiff to back things up for years. They ever did have a fancy GUI to get the data back, which is the big selling point of it, but now one is being worked on. Utilizing LVM and rdiff, a differential backup solution with versioning, and a neat GUI tool to see the previous versions is being worked on:
I finally got around to completing this--it's been a busy week. Anyway, I did decide to add revision previewing to this--as such it can preview past revisions of any kind of file which is supported by Konqueror (plaintext documents, word documents, videos, images, etc). It can also restore from any of these previous revisions. Unfortunately, this is not searchable at present--you need to know the name and path of the file you're looking for in order to preview or restore.
This is really neat! (I've also locally mirrored the TARDIS demo.)
Apple's next version of it's OS X operating system, Leopard, has 300 features, many of which I couldn't be bothered with. The most interesting is that Mail will have a built in RSS reader. I'd use that if I didn't already shell out $25 for NewsFire. Stationary? Nah, I try to send plain text emails. Forward as attachment? I was wondering when this would show up, Thunderbird and Evolution both already do it. To-do's? Aren't those already there, just in iCal? What other useless features are there:
It seems the overwhelming majority of this list is fluff. I could get it for $107 (corporate discount) but I'd be hard-pressed to justify buying it at even half of that price. Time Machine looks interesting, but I manage my own backups just find, thanks.
Now if only I could get the photo books I want. Apple just isn't offering anything I want, let alone need.
