DAVID RICE

After a good couple of weeks doing the self employed thing, the most important lesson I have learned is backup your files regularly, backup your files regularly… backup your… i think you get the point.

Apple computers have been getting really solid, and a testament to this the only trouble i’ve had in recent years has been hard drive failures… and they only seem to happen at just the right times (usually around project deadlines).

What have I learned? - Don’t Panic!

Okay well, obviosuly if you lose everything without a backup you should start to panic as you’re kinda screwed (unless you want to pay extortionate prices to data recovery guys)! What i’m suggesting is a method so when you lose a drive you won’t even care!

Bootable backups

Previously i’d used Chronosync for all of my backup needs, but recently i moved to using SuperDuper! i find it a lot smoother to use, and also as it came out trumps in a recent comparision of all Mac backup solutions.

Raid redundancy

I’m currently using a plain ol’ external hard drive to backup to. Although just recently i purchased a firewire 800 / sata / USB 2.0 five bay (raid levels 5/3/1/0) hard drive enclosure from Nitro AV.

Why spend the money on something like this? well if i’m backing up to a raid 5 disk I don’t need to worry about data loss. If a drive fails I can simply swap in another one and it will rebuild all the lost data from information on the other drives…. awesome

I haven’t got it set up yet but i’ll be sure to give it a mention when everything is running smoothly :)

Automated work environment setup

It’s often difficult to get a working environment setup, there are usually a lot of different application installers / binaries etc. to install before we can think about developing applications again. If we’re using our bootable backup that’s great… but what about when we want to re-install the system.

There’s an excellent shell script created by Geoffrey Grosenbach that will download, build and install everything you need to get ruby on rails running nicely on your Mac (be it intel or PPC). I’ve also been playing with the instructions for building imagemagick for osx intel by Will Groppe. Putting these together would main a fully atuomated rails environment setup.

There are other things we can do too… like setting up custom osx installer packages containing all the apps we regularly use, but i think that’s something for another day.