Did You ever had to rely on a backup? I mean, we are always talking about backups…
almost 10 years ago we were happy to get a quite big job and I set up a Mac Mini as filemaker server for 4 developers who were working from different locations. The schedules were tough, less than three months before going life.
Backups were set to hourly with additional, manual backups after every milestone and before of every bigger change.
FMS did schedules per hour, a TimeMachine was set up to copy the fms backups (not the databases in work) and ChronoSynk copied the backups to a ‘foreign’ location (‘cloud’ in todays wording). There was no such thing as ‘incremental backups’ at that time (FMS10)
All of the sudden, I realized that one of the disks was making noise (‘whistling’ high tones). I was sure that it was the Mini (was hard to detect/locate) because it was not brand new and there was quite some ‘load’. I created a backup, checked that, copied that to the ‘cloud’ (and on a spare disk) and did some maintenance on the mini’s disk. Was fine, but I decided to set it up from scratch.
Just after finishing, one of our cats dropped in to say ‘hello’ and get some attention. I got a small rack aside to my desk where the Mini’s are ‘towered’ with their backup disks - and the cat creeped on THE BACKUP DISK and tapped that with her paws…
It was not the Mini - it was the backup-disk that made the noise. Worst of all, while copying the files back to the Mini, it failed.
That was the first (ans only) time I was sooo happy to have more than one backup…
Cats don't go well with computers. Mine jumps over the desk and walks on the keyboard RED ALERT. Once she had a paw on the On/Off switch on my portable. Since the when I don't work with the portable, I par the mouse overt the switch.
Back to the subject of backups, not related to FMS, for a customer I had to install a new backup system, for their server room that would use Cheyenne ARCserve. There were around 40 servers to backup. The hardware use what is called a library, a big unit with two cassette units, room to park the cassettes for a week and a robot to manipulate the cassettes. On top was a unit that hardware implemented a dual backup that had it's own firmware. All of these were connected through SCSI to a PC running Windows NT 4.0.
Things is M****Y made its way into the project. Everything that could go wrong WENT WRONG :
the dual backup controller firmware had bugs that took me weeks to find out, and CA recently bought ARCserve and had released a buggy version. I finally managed to make everything work, despite the horrible support from CA. Oups, that was supposed to be funny stories.
No cats involved in my case. Had to rely on backups two times for my laptop.
The first time it was with a Sony Vayo I used for development and work on databases. It had a not so good thermal management and the HD was grilled. Swapped the HD against a new one which lasted 4 weeks. That was enough and I moved over to the Apple camp, buying a 15” MacBook Pro Retina. What a difference! However after one year the screen went black (manufacturing had switched to lead-free soldering with some issues in the process). Went to the Apple shop for repair and bought a second MacBook with a larger SSD. I set up the new machine right in the Apple store with the defective machine connected to it as the source of data for transfer. Great feature. After an hour or so I was on my way back home, with no data loss and working.
The repaired machine arrived by mail several days later.
A friend of ours had her (old) Mac broken. We went buying a new one and restored from Time Machine. Was seamless and easy.
RED ALERT. Once she had a paw on the On/Off switch on my portable. Since the when I don't work with the portable, I par the mouse overt the switch.
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