Israel Hyman’s Personal Blog

Fire!

Originally uploaded by wili_hybrid

It’s hard to sleep when I know that all of my video, from all my different shows, could forever disappear with just a small fire. I have 4 hard drives in my Mac Pro, and they’re nearly full of data, most of it video. Three terabytes of data. I also have external hard drives which I’ve been using to backup, but I’ve now arrived at that point where I no longer have room on my external drives, or on my internal hard drives.

I am almost out of space. I clearly need to go bigger. But that’s just part of my problem.

At the same time, I want to back up the data off site as well.

For the local backup solution, I’ve been looking at the Drobo with four individual terabyte drives in it. It’s an expensive solution though. All together, the package would run around $1,500 with all the drives in it. Still, most of the reviews rave about what a great backup tool the Drobo is. I can’t help salivate over the thought of the Drobo and Time Machine working in combination.

But what about the off site solution? At first I tried Mozy, an online service that would upload my data onto the internet, to store it “in the cloud” as it were. I started the backup, and after 3 days of uploading, I hadn’t even completed 1% of the data uploaded. At this rate, it would take more than a year to backup my one computer. That wasn’t feasible, so I canceled the service. Then I registered for JungleDisk which uses Amazon’s S3 service. At 15 cents per gigabyte, how could I go wrong? I started uploading, and at my upload rate, it was much faster than Mozy, but it was still going to take about 5 months. And, once you add up all the gigabytes, it was going to be an expensive solution as well. And that leaves me…

Well, I don’t know. I’m thinking that at this point, I’m better off simply copying my backups onto hard drives and storying them at a friend’s house. Maybe once per month we could swap. I’ll store their data, and they can store mine. I guess that means I’ll also have to secure my data with some sort of encryption.

What do you do for backup? Do you have any recommendations for me?

I was already short on spare time before I took on this project. Now it appears that I’m in way over my head.

My son, Blake, who is ten years old, told me that he wants to learn how to program computers. I thought I could probably help him because when I was his age, I did a little programming with Basic. In fact in elementary school, I was part of the Computer Club. I was a wiz with computers back then. I figured once a wiz, always a wiz. I was wrong.

It turns out that programming (anything useful anyway) takes a much higher level of programming language than Basic, and since we’re on Macs, we need to learn how to Program in Objective-C using a Cocoa framework, Xcode, and Interface Builder.

What does that last part mean? I don’t really know. It’s very, very confusing.

Rising to the challenge, I thought I could learn just enough to turn around and teach it to my son, so I bought a book called “Beginning Mac OS X Programming” and started studying it one chapter at a time. It seemed ideal. Both of us would end up learning it together. As the teacher, I would really learn it, because the best way to learn something is to teach it, right?

Now 150 pages into the book, I’m completely confused.

We covered variables and some basic conditional statements. And now we’re stumped. Rather, I’m stumped — which means he’s not getting much further. I feel bad for him because he wants to learn to program right now, and I can’t help him. I realize that there are probably classes out there, private tutors, maybe even audio/visual resources available for check out, which would cover the material in a way he would understand. I suppose we’ll start looking for those types of resources.

Lesson to be learned here? It’s difficult to teach something I’m clueless about.

Additional lesson? Research, then commit. :-)