Cryptosmith

I (think I) have just finished upgrading my system to OS X 10.5. I’m hesitant to declare it a success because I haven’t tried everything yet, though I’ve been reading e-mail and doing most ‘normal’ things. Apple made it difficult, but not impossible, thank goodness.

According to the documentation, all you do to move from 10.4 to 10.5 is an ‘upgrade.’ Perhaps this is true for someone, but evidently not for foolish people like myself who value reliability enough to RAID the system volume. Continue Reading »

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I’m trying to upgrade to Leopard (or is it Blotched Tabby? I can never keep their kitty cats straight) a.k.a. OS-X 10.5.

When I first got my Mac Pro, I looked at the lovely array of hard drive bays and said, “RAID!”

So I decided to RAID my system drives. Now I’m trying to un-RAID them and use Time Machine, and OS-X is being a pain about it. Actually, the RAID system has been a pain all along (I wrote a bit about this before). Continue Reading »

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This is the rest of the story about RAID with Mac OS X. The first post explains what RAID is for and how I use it in general. This one talks more specifically about RAID support in OS X and how I use it to keep my system backed up.

RAID on the Mac is a mixed bag: kind of easy but kind of hard. These days, a practical backup system really needs to preserve your entire hard drive environment: home directories, system configuration, and installed applications. Unfortunately, Apple doesn’t make this easy. It’s not bad once you get it set up and know a few tricks, but I was annoyed at the learning curve. Continue Reading »

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This is the first of two postings that talk about using RAID with Mac OS X. The second post talks specifically about OS X. This post talks about RAID and how I use it.

Thanks to RAID, I’ve developed a fairly reliable way to store lots of data with minimal risk of losing it all. The RAID mechanism itself deals with the risk of hard drive crashes. I also keep a spare hard drive away from home to reduce the risk of losing everything. Continue Reading »

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