Holding down the fort

Why am I at work on the Monday of Thanksgiving break?

Why, I am backing up the Mac server, of course.

Why are you backing up the Mac server?

Why, because I am paranoid, of course.

How long is this going to take?

All day, of course. And I am not backing up every single thing on the server, but rather what I need in case something were to happen and I had to switch out a drive or something (four drives in this baby. It was one of the last of the Quicksilver models, utter workhorse, dual 1.47 GHz G4s, 2 GB RAM, 750 GB of storage.) I also want to get student data backed up, as I don't even want to contemplate what would happen if one of those drives failed (last back up was not recent enough).

Actually, I am also moving data around right now, to make more efficient use of the storage I have. I would like to repartition one of the drives, but the shuffle of data has to come first. When I set up this machine two years ago, I planned for the future, but had no idea that my lab image would swell to the 29 GB mark. This left my boot drive uncomfortably full (I think I have about 10 GB left). I am planning on moving the radmind directory to another drive, leaving a symlink behind at the normal location.

So, the whole point of coming in today, when barely anyone is around, is to placate my inner pessimist. One copy is going home with me, the other will be on a separate drive in the machine.

Okay, that 37GBs is almost done copying. Time to backup the ArtIS drive...