Cryptosmith

I had avoided upgrading to Snow Leopard for several months, and finally completed the upgrade a few weeks ago. It went mostly without trouble, though there were a few minor things that needed to be fixed.

However, I was greeted with “new and improved!” RAID support which, as usual, provides only the most terse of directions. I rely on mirrored RAID to construct off-site backups. When I went to apply my procedure to Snow Leopard, I had to figure out the difference between “Delete” and “Demote” in order to get my backups rebuilt.

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I’ve been using Framemaker to create large documents for almost two decades. I’m currently participating in an email discussion group of Frame users, and someone asked about comparing Microsoft Word and Frame. Someone else suggested Googling for the answer, since lots of people like to talk about it.

So, here is my own contribution to the question.

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My first-order attempts to put a modern portable file system on a portable USB device have failed. The Mac, of course, has its own, proprietary file system. OS X has limited support for the Windows NTFS, so my first attempt was to try to use NTFS. This has failed, though it worked for a few months first.

For some incomprehensible reason, OS X will not mount my portable hard drive if it is formatted in NTFS. It doesn’t matter whether I format it using the OS X Disk Utility or if I format it using Windows itself. It doesn’t matter if I do fast or slow formatting. Even worse, I can’t use my third party NTFS file software (Paragon’s package) with it. Nothing works. Continue Reading »

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A recent Handler’s Log on the SANS Internet Storm Center spoke of the recent demise of an early blog site called “Journalspace.com.” Evidently their disaster recovery strategy consisted of maintaining a mirrored RAID system.

I’ve written quite a bit about how mirrored RAID is a fundamental part of my disaster recovery strategy. However, the Journalspace people apparently skipped an essential step: they relied solely on their on-line data and didn’t keep an off-line (preferably off-site) backup.

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