Thursday, January 29, 2009

TimeMachine & TimeCapsule

Ok, my plan to have the USB drive that is connected to my macbook isnt backing up via Timemachine to the Timecapsule. But I think I know why. The USB drive was FAT32, and I from what I have found, thats not a supported format for timemachine, So I now have to move the data off, reformat to HFS+, then copy the data back. So hopefully this will resolve this issue.

Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Moving to online webhosting for glittergirl

So with the whole move from self hosting and having multiple servers running at home I have slowly moved my data into the "cloud". The next step was to move my wifes website to a hosted service.
Its a really simple html site so I didn't need lots of fancy backend stuff. So my domain registrar, RegisterDirect offered webhosting, it wasn't free, but I can mange all the DNS, redirects, MX records all from one interface. And the price compared to other webhosting services wasn't that bad.

So now www.glittergirl.co.nz is a hosted site. I took me all of 20 minutes, signed up for the hosting service and paid the yearly subscription, FTPed the site up, changed the default homepage reference from homepage.html to index.html.

Done.

Thursday, January 22, 2009

An Apple a day ....

Week two of living with my new purchase, an Apple Macbook. So far .... life is good. I have just spent the last week sorting out where to store all my data (Music, Movies, Images, Software, ISOs) Since the laptop only had a 160HD and I have over 1.5TB of data I needed to come up with some way of managing it all, and not to use My vista PC as the file server as I will be using that a Windows 2008 & 7 play thing later on. So I need a consistent low maintenance approach to have my data available not only to me but also to my wifes iMac.

I limited this to just focus on the Music / Images, as the other data can be easily replace, and most of the software and other data really needs sorting and cleaned up. So this reduced the amount of data I had to deal with. I have most of my data on external USB drives and synced to another location in case a hard drive fails. So after a bit of research I decided to invest in a Apple TimeCapsule 500GB (as this model as the better harddrive)

So why did I go TimeCapsule, First simple TimeMachine backups over the network to a second drive, gave me the redundancy I needed. It also backups up USB drives attached ot the source device, which is a feature I wanted. So my macbook and the external drive that has the master source of my data is backed up to the internal TC harddrive, automatically on a daily basis. This is my failsafe for my data.

I then via a hub attached the USB drive that had my movies on it to the TC (No redundancy needed). I also attached another USB drive that has shared data on it.

So it looks like this, The USB drive attached to my laptop is the master source of data (ie all our user generated data), this is backed up via TimeMachine to the TC internal drive. I then use Chronosync to sync the shared data (Subset of the master source) to another USB drive attached to the TC. This allows the data to be accessible on the iMac & other PCs in the house.

So my master data set is in two locations and update daily, Movies are accessible to everybody on the network (AppleTv included) shared sub set of data available to all.

This allows me to have the Vista PC turned off when not is use, also I can take my laptop with me and all shared data is still available.

Clear as mud.

The biggest issue I had doing all of this was the drive formats and the time it took to move data around. Since all my USB drives were formated NTFS, which is ok in the PC and OS X can read it, but cant write to NTFS (you can get 3rd plug-ins) I wanted to OS X as much as I could and if in doubt use FAT32, Yes I know the limits of FAT32, but is a compromise that Im conformable with considering the workload the devices would be under. So finding space move the data to and then reformatting the drives and then moving the data back. I think I have shifted over 4TB, takes a long while, And I changed my mind on how to do things and had to start over again. But I am finally there now.

So as of yesterday Vista64 shut down awaiting a rebuild on Windows7 beta or Windows2008, macbook able to be turn off or taken with me, data backup up and shared data always available ..... I think Im done .... well for this week.

Thursday, January 15, 2009

Vista be gone ....

I have had a long love hate relationship with Vista64. But in the end i have decided to go and live in the MAC world and the land of Leopard. I purchased a second hand Macbook off trade me. its 18months old and isnt the flashest. But it has 3gb ram & 160GB harddive and came with leopard Disks & iLife08.

So how has life been since. Well go a mini-dvi to DVI to run an extra screen. Worked just fine with my viewsonic 21in wide screen (No drivers needed, just pluged it in and it worked).

Next big job was getting all the software I use for the MAC,

Firefox + Foxmarks
Gmail Notifer
Keeppass
Dropbox
VMware Fusion
Google Picasa
LogmeIn
Quicktime Pro
VLC
Microsoft RDP

I have it pretty well sorted at the moment. Software wise. I am build a XP VM up to run anything that I cant find for the MAC. I still have the Vista64 machine running until I feel that I have everything over that I need.

The biggest issue I have had is moving itunes and getting access to my data. This is due to Leopard by default only able to read NTFS formated drives. All my USB drives were NTFS. I know I could hack the OS to allow it to write NTFS, but didnt want to go that path. So it took forever to move 1TB of data around and reformat drives to Fat32 and move data back. But now back up data is sitting on the Vista64 box, and "live" music & media are on a USB drive connected to the Macbox,

iTunes was a real pain to move and it took a few goes but its now all configured and no loss of data.


So far very happy with the swap, will post more on the experience.