Getting a RAID backup system tomorrow. Four drive bays.

When my main desktop Mac Pro died spectactularly I thought I was doing nightly image backups of the startup disk. Every time I checked the logs it seemed to be running fine, storing the backup on an external USB drive.

But when I set up the replacement Mac Pro, I discovered this backup had not actually completed normally since July of last year. I still don’t know exactly why this happened but I’ll find out.

What makes it worse is that this catastrophic hardware failure apparently happened when some disk operations were under way, or cached incompletely or something, because when I swapped the dead computer’s startup disk into the new machine it started up fine, but I quickly discovered that things were not really fine, and the files affected were the ones I had been working on when the meltdown occurred.

Anyway, I’ve managed to rebuild everything after a lot of work and head-scratching. The drives weren’t harmed, just some data corruption.

I really hate having backups that aren’t really backups. It’s happened to me more than once because of weird hardware crashes. But that’s why I’m going the RAID route now, so the backup can be an automatic virtual mirror image.

Of course, when the meteor hits all this will be meaningless anyway, but til then I’m backed up.