Gosh

Can’t believe it’s taken me so long to log in and write my first entry. See what surgical training does to your life?

 

Garmin Connect down

Ran my fastest time for “Around the block” today. Managed to do it under 30 mins. But alas, the Garmin website is down. Still they have a good placeholder!

Office for Mac 2011 and Adobe PS CS5

Just installed Office for Mac 2011 and Adobe Photoshop CS5 on my Mac Pro today.

Of course, I cloned my boot partition with SuperDuper! before I did that.

Great Ocean Road Trip

We had a wonderful holiday in Australia over the past week. We drove from Melbourne to Adelaide along the Great Ocean Road and saw many wonderful sights.

In Melbourne, we stayed with Jeremy and Kathryn and in Adelaide we stayed with Uncle Hai and Aunt Sue.

Unfortunately, as with all holidays, it has to end some time and it’s back to work tomorrow.

Backing up

I was reading Chase Jarvis’s workflow article and in it he mentions how crucial backups are for the professional photographer. His system is pretty much bulletproof.

So far, I have been keeping all crucial information on a file server on an old Mac Mini running Ubuntu and using an external 4-disk array with ZFS RAIDZ-2. This provides security against hardware failure in the form of harddrive crashes but not to accidental deletion. Furthermore, any files I work on directly on my production machine (another Mac Mini) have no protection whatsoever.

In order to rectify some of the potential pitfalls in my workflow, I decided to install a local backup system on my workstation. The plan was to have any work on that machine backed up to an external drive connected directly to it via FireWire.

The first consideration was whether to go with the in-built Time Machine program that comes with Snow Leopard or try something else.

I considered using Crashplan but it only backs up daily unless you paid for Crashplan+ and it’s main advantage is the ability to back up over a network to another machine for redundancy. As I was only planning to use a local drive, I scratched it off the list. Also, there appear to be issues with the corrupted files.

Having used rsync and scripts by Mike Rubel previously on one of my old Debian machines during my Linux days, I googled for a backup solution for Mac OS based on rsync. It appears that I am not the only person that thinks this would be a good idea. I eventually ended up at Backup Central and found an article where Curtis Preston tries to come up with his own solution to replace Time Machine.

So my current working solution involves using Mr Preston’s script (with a few minor tweaks) to incrementally backup my user directory to an external 500Gb OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Mini. I didn’t see the need to backup my system files and applications as they were all replaceable.

The steps involved:

1. Download script by Curtis Preston.

2. Modify script to use include and exclude files in ~/.rsync/

3. Add exclusions to exclude file as suggested by “Linux for Research” blog.

4. Run the script to check that it works then move it to ~/Library/Scripts and make it executable.

5. Automate script loading with tips from StackOverflow and using Lingon to tweak the syntax.

And that’s it. Now I just need to monitor the backups over the next few days to make sure nothing goes wrong. And of course, I will eventually need to come up with a backup solution for the file server too.

Outing

We went out to Orchard Road today. Watched “Despicable Me” in 3D at the Lido Cinema at Shaw Towers. Good show.

Then we walked around a bit. Went to Ion Orchard and had gelato and wandered up to the top level to have a look at the gift shops with all their interesting wares.

Bought char siew and roast pork home to eat with instant noodles. Going to go prepare dinner now.

iPad

Got the iPad while we were on holiday in Hong Kong last week. Excellent device and highly recommended.

Typing this entry whilst waiting to collect takeaway crab dinner from Ang Mo Kio Avenue 3.

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Solid state drive upgraded

Yes. I have managed to successfully upgrade the hard-drive on my MacBook to a solid state drive.

And as I don't usually bother to conduct benchmark tests, I am afraid that there are none here either. Subjectively, I can't say I have noticed any real difference during actual work but the time taken for the laptop to wake up from sleep is certainly noticeably faster. 

Solid state drives

I am going to upgrade my 13″ White MacBook with a OCZ “Core Series V2” SATA II Solid State Drive. The thought occurred to me after reading this article by Eric Cheng.

Though due to cost issues, I am only going to be using one 60Gb drive for now.

Will keep you posted on how it turns out.