A Brief Update
Long time readers of this blog may have noticed that I haven’t posted in a while.
The radio silence for the past month was unintentional, but necessary. Three weeks ago, my daughter Sonia was involved in a serious bike accident. There was a visit to the emergency room, surgery, and many trips to the endodontist. She’s doing better now, thanks to the amazing doctors who were there to help her every step of the way.
The worst of it is now past us.
Full recovery will take time, and we are cautiously optimistic. My wife Aarti and I are both thankful Sonia is okay (and in good spirits).
Now we are slowly returning back to normalcy, whatever that means. And with each continuing day, I’m slowly, but surely, getting the itch to write about technology again.
A topic that I have been mulling for some time now is long term data storage and management. With terabytes of data (thanks to photos, movies, Photoshop files and the like), I’m looking into implementing new strategies to organize and manage my data.
At long last, my computers have outgrown their 1 terabyte drive constraints. Partitioning drives, which I practiced ritually, no longer makes sense for the large amounts of data I’m generating now. This week, I’ve been combing through my four 1 terabyte drives on my venerable 2008 Mac Pro and consolidating the most important files and folders onto a new, single 4 terabyte Western Digital Blue internal hard drive. The idea is to keep all of my important data in one place, with a newly minted, spare Western Digital Blue 4 terabyte drive serving as its cloned backup. The old 1 terabyte drives (some of which were put into commission more than 7 years ago) will be kept around as an extra set of back ups, should the need arise. I no longer employ Apple’s Time Machine, but I still maintain an off-site backup with BackBlaze.
Thanks to its four internal drive bays, the old Mac Pro now serves my needs as a somewhat cobbled together networked storage device. I’m still using a custom built PC (Hackintosh) for all of my production work. The network drives are set to auto-mount when the Hackintosh loads macOS, and I use tools like Hazel, Dropbox, Chronosync, and Keyboard Maestro to shuttle files back and forth between both machines.
Outside of the new hard drives, I haven’t made any significant changes to my computers. They serve my needs well for now.
In my next post, I’ll share my approach to organizing data. As always, thanks for reading.
-Krishna
ShadowWing Tronix
May 9, 2017 at 7:15 pmSorry to hear Sonia got hurt but happy to hear she’s recovering!
Krishna
May 9, 2017 at 9:26 pmThanks, Shadowwing. Sonia’s been amazing in terms of her spirit and bravery throughout it all. Way more than I would have been if I were in her shoes.
Shane
May 10, 2017 at 1:10 amGood to hear your daughter is getting better.
One of the beauties of ZFS is you create a pool of multiple drives and use the combined storage as if it was one disk, with multiple copies allowing the checksums to recover from bad disk blocks, you can also replace drives with larger ones to increase your storage over time without having to reformat or manually copy files. Sadly Apple dropped the plans of adding zfs support, but there is openzfsonosx. You could also look at setting up a machine running freenas as a network server for backups and longer term storage.
Krishna
May 10, 2017 at 9:17 pmThank you, Shane. I’ll definitely look into the options you’ve suggested. It’s ashame that Apple didn’t move forward with ZFS given the benefits it would bring to the file system. HFS+ is old and creaky.
Scott P.
May 18, 2017 at 4:13 pmApple’s new APFS looks promising as an HFS+ replacement.
Damunsta
June 4, 2017 at 12:32 pmHaving children can sometimes keep your life in exclamation mode , I’m happy to hear that she is recovering well brother ….You needn’t worry about your site your fans will always understand that life happens . We will be here , your family is what’s important.
I wanted to know is there a way to view a step by step of your hackentoish build ? Or some insight …..I am planning on building my own and would love to get a perspective of a graphic designer and what hardware you use for the build .
Krishna
June 4, 2017 at 5:58 pmThanks Damunsta. I have a few articles on building my Hackintosh. Here’s one article with my parts list:
https://pcweenies.com/2015/07/25/the-robeast-pc-build-assembly/
and more assembly:
https://pcweenies.com/2015/08/23/building-the-hackintosh-part-1-adding-the-gpu-and-ssd/
I have a mATX PC (Gigabyte motherboard) with 16GB of RAM, Crucial SSD and a Thermaltake case. Let me know if you have any questions – happy to help any way I can!