MacBackup
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Need a few petabytes of Mac storage? Build your own BackBlaze Storage Pod
One of the largest personal iTunes libraries I've ever seen belongs to a client of mine. This client, who was a DJ in the 50's and 60's, has a huge collection of vinyl albums and singles that he painstakingly digitized, cleaned up, and catalogued in iTunes. Needless to say, opening iTunes on his Mac Pro is an exercise in patience. Thinking about his music storage needs, and the huge amount of digital photos and video that my wife are accumulating, got me musing about other ways to do mass storage inexpensively. At this point, I'm probably OK with a DroboPro, but what if I needed petabytes (1 petabyte = 1,024 terabytes = 1,048,576 gigabytes) of storage? Most solutions at this point in time are quite expensive. As of 6 AM PDT this morning, off-site backup vendor BackBlaze has put their solution to mass storage needs, the BackBlaze Storage Pod, out to the world as an open source project. Their solution is a relatively inexpensive box (US$7,867 for 67 TB of storage) made up of off-the-shelf components that can be reproduced and/or improved upon by others who also need huge amounts of cheap storage. See those red boxes in the picture to the right? Each one of those contains 67 TB of RAID 6 storage in a 4U box. For a petabyte of storage, you're going to need to spend about $117,000 on about fifteen of the boxes.
Mars Needs Backups
Since backing up is the computing equivalent of a dentist visit -- sure you should do it, but it seems to slip down the priority list somehow -- we all end up looking for the WaterPik of backup to reduce the pain and aggravation. With SuperDuper!, Retrospect and others crowding the pool and Time Machine looming in the near future, here come our little green friends at Martian Technology. The LGM seem to grok the problem of triggered backups, where an external storage device may come and go; the desired behavior is for the backups to happen when the storage is there, and not when it's... well, not.Martian Lifeboat is out now for $14.99 with free demo, allowing you to define separate LifeBoats to back up whenever your target device is ready and willing. The license is good for every Mac in your collection... no more excuses! If you try it, let us know your results.Thanks Greg!
Apple testing new Backup update
We got word from a tipster that Apple is about to seed a software update for their Backup application to select users, who are being notified by invitation-only to participate in the super-exclusive AppleSeed program. No word yet on what improvements or enhancements are being tested, but we'll let you know as soon as our mole gets back to us. We're guessing it has something to do with making Backup's .Mac features not suck so much and having it work more than 40% of the time. At least that's what we're hoping for.
How to: Make your own .Mac Backup QuickPicks
This tip comes courtesy of JC at Mac Geekery, who has discovered how easy it is to roll your own QuickPicks for .Mac Backup by editing the DefinitionPlist.strings found inside the packages within Library/Application Support/Backup/QuickPicks/. QuickPicks are those pre-defined backup sets that grab specific types of essential files, like all your Excel docs, or your entire iPhoto or iTunes Library, or all your text files. As JC points out, many 3rd party apps install convenient QuickPicks of their own, but for those that don't, you can now create them yourself without breaking a sweat. It's little things like this that you don't realize just how handy they are until someone else points it out. And remember, kids... you're only as good as your last backup.
