Backing Up
I did make a massive post about the server we have at home, it’s pretty crap because I’m rubbish at setting it up properly. Now, after all that time, it finally broke. The problem? I was tinkering with something called software RAID and I lost the partitions from booting up.
It went from ext3 format to linux_software_raid and wouldn’t start. Oh no, all the Johnny Two Shoes games are gone forever? Well, no. I always have a recent copy on Amazon S3 and since we started this recent project, we’ve been working from our mac book pros so we had 90% of the data available. But some things like some Heist tweaks we’re making for Kongregate and other snippets were on those disks and I’d rather get them working than download 250GB off the internet.
Today, Saturday, I cracked it! I booted off the ubuntu live CD and mounted the old drives forcing it to load with the ext3 format and BOOM it just works. The data is safe and sound. PHEW!
And I REALLY want to get that Kongregate project finished before Josh goes to SF so we can buy the Herman Miller Embody chairs, we went to the showroom the other day in Alwych, near Holborn (after visiting Warner) and they were so comfortable! Sure, they cost 1,500 pounds each, but it’s not really much considering what they will do for us (make us live longer). Plus, I found a place that sells them for 800 a piece, another BOOM.
Now, I’m about to start duplicating all that data to an external drive I bought just for this situation. 500GB so it will store everything.
My new plan is this, duplicate the data to 500GB Lacie.
Format existing server 500GB drives to hardware RAID with the RAID controller I bought.
Format old 500GB drives to be extra storage for the media server so I can split movies, tv series from JTS data (and not bother backing up the movies, tv series. let’s face it, they can get deleted anytime and I won’t care).
Copy Lacie 500GB data back to the RAID 500GB drives, move content not worth backing up to movie drive and the other drive can be partitioned to be a time machine storage for the mbp’s with a partition for me and another for Josh.
Setup mediatomb server to constantly check the new movie drive for stuff.
With our old 250GB drives, install Windows 7 and put Josh’s old 3870 in my machine, so I have 2 and Josh can put his better single graphics card in his machine.
I hope that works everything out, I know this is a boring post, it’s mainly for myself.
