I recently went to Disney with my girlfriend Amanda.  In Epcot, they have a minature train set setup I think near Germany.  I took this picture from the ground level view of the miniatures on that set (you can see a Godzilla like tourist roaming in the background). If you click the below picture, you’ll be able to see a 1920×1200 resolution version.

I recently implemented a triple redundant backup system to back up over 500 gigs of data.  After some reflection, I realized if I ever lost the data stored on my machine, I would be quite livid.  I ended up buying 2x Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drives – OEMWD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5″ Internal Hard Drives – OEM and 1x Western Digital Element 1TB 3.5″ Black External Hard Drive – Retail.  The two Caviar’s are mirroring one another via Raid 1 while the external drive is backing up the entire raid about once a week.  My motivation for implementing triple redundancy is as follows.  Raiding the drives was because I wanted to have a live, real time backup in case one of the 1TB internal drives dies.  The problem with having an internal drive is if a power surge or lightning strike fries your computer, you lose both hard drives.  Given the fact that I have my entire dissertation, all of my research, thousands of pictures, and all sorts of other awesome data on these drives, losing both drives simultaneously would be unacceptable.  So, I stepped up my backup game and upped the ante to triple redundancy.  The pros of having the external drive are to overcome lightning strikes, power surges, or the computer being hacked and all the data deleted, etc.  The external drive is only connected once a week for a period of about 8 hours for the backup, and then it is disconnected the rest of the week.

Question:  So how do we sync the data onto an external drive?  Answer:  <Cobian!>

With using the external drive, I needed a program that would automatically sync all of the data on the raided internal drives to the external drive.  I decided before running to purchase a program to do this, I would check in with the <open source> community.  Low and behold, I came across <Cobian>.  I am very pleased as Cobian accomplishes the straight forward task of syncing the data on the raided drives to the external drive perfectly without being overly complicated about it.  First, do a ‘Full Backup’ of the data to your external drive and then schedule weekly/daily/etc. incremental backups.  New to backing up data, I had to actually read up on these terms (full vs differential vs incremental) myself.

In other news, I use this program called Input Director and I found this past June they released a <new version> to add additional support for Windows 7.  I recently formatted my older computer and put the new Windows 7 OS on it and installed <the latest version of Input Director>.  I could not address the older computer (running Windows 7) from my newer computer(running Vista) via the computer name until I turned on ‘network discovery’ on the older computer.  I could only address the older computer via it’s IP address.  Needless to say, after turning on network discovery, I did get Input Director working across both systems.

The third <PA D&D podcast> is out for this recent series.  Looks like they are being released every Friday.

I frequently visit the Interfacelift site for high resolution wall papers and recently saw this excellent background posted:

Credit goes to <Adamschroder> for the above gorgeous scene!

Tags: 1920x1200, Backup, Cobian, D&D, Input Director, PA, wall paper, Windows 7

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