Fixed Points

1. Image of the Jiffy

   

2. Backups: Once More, with Anger

3. Southwest REFUSED Cash For Booze

   Donna Campbell saved up, bit by bit, the $5 required to buy a Finlandia Vodka screwdriver, but when she showed up at the flight with a sackful of quarters to buy the booze, she found she was out of luck.

   Campbell recalls her visit to Austin-Bergstrom International Airport: I had my change in the backpack and I went up proudly to the stewardess and told them, I would like to get my drank on.

   Southwest Airlines’ sales policy states that inflight beverages must be purchased by credit or debit card, according to ABC News. No plastic means no party, and the airline employee turned Campbell away.

   They said, Sorry, we don’t take cash. And, so I looked at her and I said OK she’s kidding, Campbell tells ABC News.

   Although Southwest did not respond to ABC News’ request for an explanation, Campbell was told by an airline representative that the plastic-only policy is intended to cut down on over-consumption—customers who buy vast numbers of screwdrivers, in order to drown their sorrows.

   See ABC News’ video report here.

4. Backup

   I’m here to tell you about backup. A month or two ago, some internet bigwigs ventured to do the same, but readers looking for simple guidelines were left lacking. And one thing abundantly clear about backup is this: if it’s not simple, we won’t do it.

   I see you there. You’re saying You’re not talking about me. I’m no simpleton. I know computers. My rsync shell script and RAID 5 array have me covered. And maybe they do. But when they break, will you have time to fix them? If you’re on a deadline, will you take time out of your day to repair your custom one-off solution? I wouldn’t, and I bet you wouldn’t either. And that is precisely when you will lose all your data.

   Three questions

   This will have a decidedly Mac-oriented slant, so if you’re using some lesser OS, you’re on your own. But the base principles apply.

   First steps

   Would you be ok with losing all the data on your primary drive due to a disk crash or operator error?

   I’m going to guess most of us say no to this one. Well, we’re in luck, because it’s a pretty easy fix in OS X.

   Start by buying two drives. Why two? So if the backup drive fails you can continue backing up with no interruption. You don’t want a hard drive crash to wipe your data because you didn’t have time to order a replacement backup drive. Make sure each drive is at least twice the size of your boot drive so Time Machine has room to keep extra copies of each file. If you accidentally erase or overwrite a file it’s trivial to recover an earlier version from Time Machine.

   And you don’t even have to spend very much. Bookmark this page for your drive shopping needs. If you’re savvy enough, buy an enclosure and two of the drives from the SATA section. If you don’t know what that means, buy two from the enclosure section. As I’m writing this, the cheapest non-opened drive clocks in at fifteen gigabytes per dollar. That’s insane. Buy two, plug one into your Mac, and back up continuously. If you have a laptop, plug it in every night before you go to bed.

   Fire and brimstone

   Would you be ok with losing all your data due to flood, fire, or theft?

   If disaster strikes your machine, the likely scenario is that it strikes your backup too. The only solution is offsite backup. It’s possible to cycle out your backup drive once a week or so by swapping which you’re actively using and bringing the other to work, but this is a manual process and so is prone to laziness.

   Buy a Backblaze membership. By default it will back up everything in your home folder to an offsite location. If you need your files back, you can request them in DVD, hard drive, or zip form. You can even browse your backed-up files online and download subsets. Backblaze also keeps multiple versions of each file, though I would recommend using Time Machine as a first resort for this sort of versioned backup.

   It’s five dollars a month or fifty a year. You get unlimited storage. If you were born today and died two hundred years from now, lifetime membership would cost $10,000. This article says a worst-case DriveSavers job is $2,800—for a 4 GB drive. Drives today are 250 times larger. You do the math.

   Refractoring

   If your boot drive failed today, would you be able to get back up and running in time to complete something with a deadline of tomorrow?

   We’re now at the end of our little story. If you use your home machine for little more than web browsing, photos, and email, you probably have never missed a deadline due to personal computer issues. But if you’re a student, freelancer, blogger, or programmer, the above question may bring back painful memories.

   So you know those drives I said to buy? Yeah, you’re gonna need two more. You can skimp on the size this time: just make sure they’re at least as large as your boot drive. Next, buy a copy of Super Duper! Turn on the incremental backup (Smart Update) feature and schedule a daily backup to the smaller drive.

   Time Machine and Backblaze give you versioning and offsite security. This gives you a wicked fast mean time to repair. What you’ve now got is a bootable clone of your main drive at most a day old. If disaster should strike, you don’t need to reinstall your OS and applications, just reboot, hold Option, and choose the cloned drive. Unfortunately you no longer have an excuse for missing that deadline.

   Economics

   So in the worst case you answered yes to all three questions. Let’s say your primary machine has a 1 TB drive and you expect it to last you three years. What does this all cost you?

   Item	Quantity	Cost
   Total		$709.94
   2.0 TB HD	2	$259.98
   1.5 TB HD	2	$199.98
   Enclosure	2	$99.98
   Backblaze	3	$150.00

   Think of all the photos, video, music, and records you own. Is it worth more than $500 to you? Is it worth a marginal $200 to miss a deadline?

5. Is this thing on?

   This whole Tumblr thing is still mildly confusing to me. I’ll probably get the hang of it right before I stop posting altogether.