Anthony Martin’s Weblog

I've been using Mozy to perform backups on my home system.  Basically, Mozy is an online backup solution.  It's rather inexpensive compared to certain solutions and more expensive than others.

One of the problems I've had is that Mozy never seems to ever complete the backup.  According to the log the longest attempt was a try for 3 hours, and in that attempt, the software only got half way through my total backup.  It seems to give up after 11 tries or so.  Each subsequent attempt would get only so far then report failure.

I was thinking of giving up on it since after a month, it never completed a backup.  But I also noticed that the log claimed to have files on the server, with the message "Already on server."  In other words, my client would report a file to upload, but the server would claim it already had the file, which is good.  So it appears that previous failed attempts did actually result in files being backed up.

But how many files have been backed up?  That's the thing, I don't know from the client.  But the server says there are massive files on its side.  I'd estimate about 65% or 70% of the files I've been trying to upload have actually reached the server.  And that's a sliding average because I have a lot of large video files that I back up locally and remove.  So it might actually have all of my files.

Bottom line is that over a month's worth of use, a large number of files have reached the Mozy server, so I'm going to stick with Mozy for now.  I'm not happy with the client, but it appears to move in the direction I want.  I think the client could certainly improve, but I'm willing to work with it.

One neat application for iPhone is Google Voice Search.  So today, I tried the new Earthquake results in Google.  I'm sure they'll fix it soon, but witness a rare Google FAIL!

There is already a lot out there about ICE.  Snopes has an article.  Even Benjamin's school talks about it.  If you're not aware of what it is, in a nut shell, ICE stands for "In Case of Emergency."  It is supposed to manifest as an address book entry in your mobile phone.  I think there are many ways to do it, but this is how I do it on my iPhone:

1. Create a new address book entry with the Company Name of: ICE
2. Add spouse's phone number followed by a hash (#).
3. Add home phone number followed by a hash (#).
4. Add work phone number followed by a hash (#).
5. Add own mobile number followed by a hash (#).
6. Add mother's mobile number followed by a hash (#).

I use the custom label feature of iPhone rather than leave each entry labeled as "other" or whatever the default is.  I am emphasizing the hash (#) for a reason.  If you do not have a hash at the end, likely your phone will match incoming calls to the ICE entry, which is a pain.  I would rather see my wife's name and photo show on the screen when she calls, not just "ICE."  In the unlikely even a first responder has to look over your address book, he or she will likely not be confused by the hash.  So it's the best of both worlds.  Anyway, that's my only alteration to the instructions other than the reason I have my own mobile number listed in my ICE entry is just in case my phone is involved by I am not.  If that happens, I can check my messages and find out what's going on.  Anyway, I hope that helps.  Enjoy.

One of my favorite sites is called Skewz.com.  It's a place to read conservative and liberal stories selected by users.  The users can submit any type of entry from news articles, editorials, blogs posts, and even YouTube videos.  Then, these users look for liberal or conservative bias and record it by moving a slider left or right.

If you write about politics in your blog like I do occasionally, you should consider adding your articles to Skewz.  I went back and added all of the articles tagged as Political.  The image below is what my bias looked like as of today at 10:30 AM.  I'm sure it'll move around quite a bit.

To see the current bias, check out my blog's profile.

This week I got the family desktop configured to use a RAID array (mirrored) for primary storage.  So now it's booting, mirrored, and I feel better knowing the data is safe.  The array is built from two Seagate Barracuda SATA 7200.10 and I have a backup drive offline, waiting in its static bag in case one fails.  They are 250 GB each to match the original size in order to avoid any mirroring issues and because they were inexpensive.

After setting it up, I did a disk verify on both the old and new volumes to see which one was faster.  The old volume could be verified in about 10 minutes.  The new one took almost 2 minutes.  So I'm very happy with that boost.

I didn't need any special software to do this.  All I used were the utilities and features supplied in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.  I've seen several approaches, some more risky than others.  Some suggest third party software to accomplish what Leopard can already do.  So I recommend the following procedure:

1. Install the new drive.
2. Boot and begin in the Disk Utility to erase the new drive, calling it "New Macintosh HD".
   • Quit Disk Utility and issue a terminal command:
   • diskutil enableRAID mirror /Volumes/New\ Macintosh\ HD
3. Reopen the Disk Utility, click on the new drive, and use the Restore option to copy the boot disk onto "New Macintosh HD".
   • You will need to pay attention because the new drive has two entries in the list of volumes; slice name and RAID group name.  You want to ignore the slice.
   • In the Restore tab of the new drive, drag the old volume to the first field and the new volume to the second field.  This will cause the first field to become "/" and the second field to become "New Macintosh HD" with an icon.
4. When the copy is complete, selected "New Macintosh HD" as the boot disk in System Preferences and reboot.
5. Now verify the old drive to make sure there were no errors.  I recommend doing this after booting on the new drive because the verify can now be more thorough due to the fact that the system didn't boot to it.  If it's all clear, proceed.  If not, you're on your own.  You probably just need to do a repair and this procedure start over.  Make sure you boot back to the old drive after the repair.
6. Shut down and remove the old drive and replace it with another identical drive.
   • Replacing it is optional, but the old drive is now a backup of the system.  In my case, I wanted both drives to be identical for performance reasons.
   • Boot into the one-disk (degraded) RAID group and use the Disk Utility to drag the new disk into the RAID group.  This erased the new disk and start the mirror "repair".  This may take many hours to complete.
   • You need to pay attention because the dialog window in the Disk Utility can be behind the main Disk Utility window.  If you lose it, click Window, then Disk Utility Progress.  If it stops, close the Disk Utility and open it up again.  If you get bored, open the Activity Monitor and watch the Disk Activity or go have a beer (preferably both).

This is only one of many possible solutions.  Using this as the most basic solution is great because it guards against failure and is very low maintenance once it's set up and it doesn't cost as much.  Apple's Time Machine is still my favorite solution, but it's pretty expensive to do it right .

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