PolyMicro Systems

Just discovered a neat way to stack Finder windows. Wonder how long it has been in there????

Anyway, try this!

opt-click zoom button twice and your Finder windows should be nicely stacked.

Enjoy

Yet another article to get Help back to its normal behavior.

macosxhints.com - 10.5: Revert Help Viewer to 10.4-like behavior

Having learned many years ago that keeping multiple backs is essential I decided to add an external drive to my MacBook Pro workstation. I had been backing up to me XServe but the high power cost of running a server and RAID which I primarily access for archival and storage was not making very much economic sense.

I am currently paying about $.37/kWH at the 300% over baseline tier rate which works out to $133/month to leave the server on 24/7. So, now I am setting up the system to be turned on remotely only when I want to access files or to backup.

So my new strategy is to use the external drive as my primary backup with a periodic backup to the server. With that in mind, I formated the new external 500GB drive into 3 partitions as follows.

Installer

8GB partition for Leopard Installer

Mirror

190GB partition mirror image of my internal drive

TM

267GB partition for Time Machine

Installer

This partition contains the copy of Leopard Installer I create with Superduper. If my internal goes down I should be able to reboot from this partition to recover the Time Machine backup contained in the TM parition. Also will contain the 10.5.2 update when it becomes available.

Mirror

I setup Superduper to backup my entire internal hard drive every morning at 4AM. A time which I am least likely to be using the computer. At first I was going to only backup the system minus the /Users folders but decided to consider the /Users as just another backup of my home folder just in case Time Machine goes bonkers. I should not be trusting my data entirely with new technology.

TM

I decided to use Time Machine as my secondary backup of my home folder in addition to he daily backup onto the Mirror partition primarily for the snap shot capability. I set up TM to exclude the system files as they can be readily restored from either the daily backup on Mirror or from the Installer. I also excluded the following very large folders which don’t really need to be backed up at all.

~/.Trash

/.Trashes

/bin

~/Documents/browseback

/Library/Caches

~/Library/Caches

/Developer

/Previous Systems

/System

/tmp

/var

~/Library/FileSync

Summary

I will continue making periodic backups to the server at least twice a week. When I get time I will write up a script to watch for the server being available and startup my backup whenever I bring it online. Using the new FSEvents to keep track of changes between backups would be nice. Wondering if this might be a possible product now that I think about it. Once configured, the program would notice the backup volume is available and start to copy over the changes since the last time the volume was online.

Posted in Systems