IDLE HANDS

A friend of mine David, lost all his stuff due to hard rive failures, not one, not two, but three failures over a year. When his second drive failed and all that data was unsaveable I decided to get a proper backup system going. I did not want to loose all my songs, my photos or my source code, not that either of these will save the planet but they are important to me.

So my old way of burning stuff on DVD’s where out of the question, that took to long and besides, with the cheap DVD’s I buy it’s not like I would be able to recreate the data again. So hard-drives then or an internet-based backup then? well, I save some stuff with drop-box (free version)

Then I made a OS X mirrored raid. It’s dead easy, just follow these steps:

1. Buy 2 identical external disks (I bought 2 1tb USB2.0)
2. Connect them to your computer
3. Open Disk Utility
4. Create a new Mirrored Raid in Disk Utility and drag-drop the two new drives onto it.
5. Press yes yes OK finish
6. PROFIT!

This was dead easy, but as it turns out, there are no warning mechanisms in OS X, the best you can do is to use the console to do a diskutil checkRAID to se of they are online. This was not good enough for me so I did a quick versiontracker search and found a program (that I guess just calls that command) and screams,emails shop dialogs when either drives are offline. It’s called RAID Eye and I guess having that is better then having a pink eye 🙂

Now I’m secure, and I wont lose a all my shit, and there is plenty of space for my wife to put her stuff on as well.