Reading through your post brought back many memories of how I used to manage my data.
I also found SuperDuper and Carbon Copy Cloner great for making a duplicate of my Mac's boot drive, which also contained my data. After juggling around with cloning boot/data drives and using non-redundant Time Machine backups etc, plus some manual copies here and there, I said 'there must be a better way' and so the long search ended up with the idea of having fairly 'dumb' boot drives containing OS and apps for each desktop PC and moving the data itself onto a redundant RAID NAS using ZFS. I won't bore you with the details any more -- see the link below if it's interesting. BTW, I still use SuperDuper for cloning my boot drive and it IS terrific. Regardless of where the data is, one still needs to do backups, like you say. Indeed, I know all about scrub and do that regularly and that is a great tool to guard against silent failure aka bit rot. Once your data is centralised, making data backups becomes easier, although other problems like the human factor still come into play :) If I left my backup system switched on 24/7 it would in theory be fairly easy to (1) automate NAS snapshots and then (2) automate zfs sends of the incremental differences between snapshots, but I don't want to spend the money on electricity for that. And when buying drives every few years, I always try to take advantage of Moore's law. Cheers, Simon http://breden.org.uk/2008/03/02/a-home-fileserver-using-zfs/ -- This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
