Apple must have been reading my blog when I wrote-up how to use two locations for Time Machine. Now in Mountain Lion it is built in and is much more seamless than my band-aid hack. Backups were always such an elusive concept for people, but Apple has really done a great job here. If you own a Mac and do not use Time Machine…shame… The two locations here are a Whole Disk Encrypted external FW drive and a Debian file server with an encrypted volume. ...
Contents 0.1 The Ingredients: 0.2 Secret Magic Scripts: 0.3 Letting the Penguins talk to the Fruit: 0.4 Convince the Mac its right at home: 0.5 Location, Location, Location: <li> <a href="#Share_this"><span class="toc_number toc_depth_1">1</span> Share this:</a> </li> With the purchase of the Apple Thunderbolt Display my Air now has a jumbo-frame enabled ethernet port at its disposal. My current backup strategy is to utilize an encrypted external USB laptop drive while on the road and to just rsync the latest backup when I get home. This has been working great for a year straight (saved my greasy bacon when the airlines forgot my bag) but I figured it was time to reevaluate with my fancy monitor in the mix. ...
Geeks pride themselves on the ability to institute good backup routines. We laugh in the faces of those poor souls who scream and yank hair as they watch their data disappear into the ether. Tonight I realized that a fresh slate might not be such a poor thing to do once in awhile. My hard drive is full on the MacBook Pro and it is driving me crazy as I attempt to work on some virtual images. I did what any geek in my position would do and wrote a short script to hunt down where the space had disappeared to. I found it in a folder called Annulment. Annulment. I had come up close and personal with my backup routine and knew that I better inspect before simply deleting. It had been years since I looked in the folder which I had encrypted for some reason. That should have been an indicator in and of itself but I decide to unencrypted anyways. Deep down I guess I will forever be a pack rat and the rat had found his old hole now. Slowly the file names began to remind me of what was in this folder and it brought tears to my eyes. Let me state that it isn’t that I am not over the whole ordeal, I am. What is amazing if you line this up with yesterdays post is that we do well to block out the bad. When you find your 3 year old backup routine the bad comes front and center. Why do we keep mementos of a past we despise? Everyone has something in the closet, a shoebox filled with letters from a high school sweet heart, a picture of that time in the military. We keep things. I tried to think back to what was my reason for going as far as to encrypt and store this archive. What were the thoughts on my mind 3 years ago when I went through all this trouble. It seemed that reading through the documents and emails did little to remind me of why I was this stupid. Then I opened one inauspicious file that truly ripped into my heart. To respect her privacy I will only post the snippets that pertain to this 2:45AM writing: ...