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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Here are some more observations on using RAID on the Mac OS X, particularly in terms of off-site storage, terminology, and upgrading. Here is a photo of my former off-site hard drive:

It’s been sitting in an office desk drawer for a couple of months, and the time came to cycle it back into the RAID set. But when I tried to spin it up, I was greeted by a disappointing rattle, and the drive didn’t come on-line. The drive, a WD 7500 AAKS, was 14 months old when it died. In the photo above, I’ve removed the case cover in preparation for an autopsy.

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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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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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