Some Highly Technical Stuff

First of all, a disclaimer: this blog is about my kids. The fact that I am about to go off on a rather technical rant should in no way be construed to mean that this blog is no longer about my kids. It’s an aberration, but one that I think certain readers deserve, being that the old web site has now gone over four months without an update. If you don’t care, feel free to skip this one. I won’t mind. ;-)

For the long-time reader, it probably shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that I haven’t updated things, in a while; I’ve never been particularly good at it. However, the astute reader may remember that, as of March 2, I was completely up to date and had rededicated myself to keeping it that way. And almost immediately thereafter, it happened.

It was a hard drive failure, which really shouldn’t have been a big deal. (Note: here comes the technical stuff!) My main computer—the one I use for just about everything—is stocked to the max, with hard drives. The system and applications are on a RAID-1 set, the files are on a second RAID 1 with a hot spare, and each RAID is backed up to a separate Firewire drive. LIkewise, our dedicated iServer—which stores all of our iLife stuff—has a RAID 1 for the system, a RAID 1 for the files, and a Firewire backup for the files. (The system is so basic, I’ve never bothered to back it up beyond the RAID.) So when one of my main machine’s drives failed, it really wasn’t a big deal. In fact, it was nice to have an excuse to upgrade the system drives, which I did by removing the old 500GB RAID from the iServer and replacing it (and its associated backup) with a brand new, 1500GB RAID 1 and Firewire backup. All I had to do was transfer the files, and I’d be set.

Or so I thought.

I’m not sure how or when this happened, but at some point, the header block on the iRAID had become corrupt. What’s more, since I was doing block-level backups, the backup was corrupted, too! I can’t even tell you how much time I spent, repeatedly repairing the header block and combing the three drives for every last bit of information. Thankfully, I think I got all of the kid stuff, and since I regularly share photos with my parents, a lot of them are on their machine, too. But now I’m left with dozens of iPhoto libraries and am in the long, drawn-out process of trying to merge them all. (Thank goodness for iPhoto Library Manager and Duplicate Annihilator!)

So there’s my equally long and drawn-out excuse for not updating everything, in a timely fashion. Thankfully, I’ve finally given in and decided to use this site instead of iWeb, and the next step is to move all the photos and movies (new ones first!) to a more streamlined web experience (probably Facebook or Flickr, since they’re completely integrated with iPhoto ’09, anyway). In the meantime, though, I’ve learned a couple of very important lessons about hard drive maintenance:

1) Don’t do a block-level backup unless you absolutely need to (e.g. the drive has a functional system on it, and you’d like to have a bootable backup).

2) Run Disk Utility’s Repair Disk feature (or something similar) on all of your drives, on a regular basis. The early stages of corruption are still reparable; the later stages are not.

3) Don’t knock offsite backups. Sure, they’re annoying, but wow are they nice, if you need one! ☺

I shall now step down from my soapbox and allow iPhoto Library Manager to continue creating a brand new library, while I get back to bed (which is really where I belong, atm). Next time on Drakelings, back to the kids! ☺