Devolfamily

[update 3/26/09: Still having problems with Carbonite now wanting to re-backup items that already exist in my backup set. Carbonite goes to 50% CPU (on a dual core cpu) usage and hangs on the file. New files back up just fine. No amount of removing the file form my backup set and trying again has helped. Luckily I'm very close to my subscription being up. So if worse comes to worse, I'll just sign up for a new account and spend the month and a half backing everything up again. Support was awful as everyone's comments have said. But, at least in my case, it may not prove to be fatal. They indicated that files would be removed from the backup set 24-72hrs after they were removed. So I've giving it a full week and I'll try to add the files that were getting stuck this weekend. Not hoping for much though.

I tried a couple of other competing products, and the best that I came up with was Elephant Drive. I need Win2003 support, and it was Carbonite, Elephant Drive and iDrive. Didn't record my likes/dislikes for each service. I remember one was frustrating because you had to specify directories to backup and then had to explicitly specify which file extensions to be backed up. Easy to miss something important. And then one, probably iDrive, you had to schedule the backup. Which might be great if you already have a backup program that you like, because it was mapped as a network drive. I however prefer files to be monitored and backed up immediately as it changes and I didn't feel like (I might still have to) find a backup program that explicitly does that.

Oh, and I've also gone and got my self a 1TB WD MyBook to do a local backup, leaving online back to (hopefully) catch really really import stuff like family pictures in the case of fire. But the MyBook doesn't come without it's own issues. The application it uses for monitoring and backing up files (by Memeo) can't do open file backup. So no backing up my networked Time Machine sparsebundle.]

[update 3/17/09: Restore is finally done, all 170Gb of it. After that first week, it seemed to pick up but it was sporadic. Now though, Carbonite won't come out of restore mode. Time to sort that out.]

Last Sunday night (I think, my memory is going fast) we had a little power outage and it absolutely freaked the cheap little raid card in my home server. One of the drives is currently working, but it’s suspect and needs to be swapped out once everything’s restored. Unfortunately, the controller thought one of the drives (that appears to be completely fine now) was bad, even after it was replaced with a new drive. During rebuild, it kept timing out which would hard lock everything. In a vain attempt to recover my crap, I kept power cycling the drive which allowed it to rebuild just a little more each time and buying myself a bit more time to offload everything. Unfortunately, it was not to be.

And this is where Carbonite comes in. Or doesn’t. Oddly enough, after the logical drive was wiped and recreated, all drives are functioning normally. But now to get my data back. No problem, I have a yearly membership to Carbonite’s unlimited backup service and every time I’ve checked, everything that I specified to back up was shown backed up.

Yeah, you can see where this is going.

Time to put it to use and restore. Oh, look, not everything’s here?!? Actually, that’s fine. Everything I really want is shown available for restore. The rest of the stuff was just old junk that I’ve been hauling around for years and needed going through anyway. There are a few things that will need to be replaced, but not immediately. Most importantly, my mysql dbs, my wordpress installs, my music collection and my itunes db were there.

The problem is, at this rate, my restore is going to take close to 3 months. Yeah, I said 3mo. Over the last eight hours, I’ve averaged 300MB/hour. And I don’t know what it’s doing about selecting files to restore. Knowing that my music was going to take forever, I selected my wordpress / mysql stuff first. Got the mysql, didn’t get the wordpress. Which is why I’m at the default theme right now and none of my images work.

Good time for a redesign I guess.