Re: Compressing huge files

In article <sdfisher-D164D8.22571604072008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Steven Fisher <sdfisher@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

What if the internal drive is a tiny one, by todays standards,
say 60 GB for example, with just the bare minimum stuff
on it such as OS 10.5.4

...and the _external_ drive is a big fast honking one,
a full sized drive of say 1 TB spinning at 10,000 rpm.

Would the Mac user suffer in any way with such a lashup?

Firewire is definitely fast enough, but I'm pretty sure Boot Camp still
only supports internal drives. That is my problem with a small internal
drive.

Yipe! - I forgot about that, I am in the same fix, so going to
call Apple today to see if they will replace my 160 GB 7200rpm
drive in my one-year old MacBook Pro with a larger 7200 drive.
(probably not)


Switching to VMware made this much less pressing for me.

You are lucky, I need the operational speed of Boot Camp.


If having a small internal ever became a real problem, I could probably
find a way to push the SATA out via a cable through the Ethernet port
(which I don't use) to work around this.

This outfit claims 300 MB per second transfer speed, that would
be about 16 gigabytes per minute.

<http://firmtek.stores.yahoo.net/sata2ensm2e.html>

Wonder what the catch is.

Right now it takes me 40 minutes to transfer a 76 GB file,
even using large block sizes of 524,288 bytes and FW-800.
(from an internal drive to an external drive)

That is roughly 2 GB per minute, a far cry from 16 GB/min




2) If a nasty cracker dumps a partition-table virus onto
your Mac, that virus will stay intact to plague you
_after_ your restore operation.

I know, such a thing is not at all likely to happen to you,
we Mac users are very fortunate in that respect.

...and it can be defeated by re-partitioning your Macs
hard drive, _before_ you do the TM restore

Would that be different if I was cloning the drive? I'm sure a
hypothetical virus that got into one partition table would spread
to the other.

I assume you are referring to the clone backup file itself
being contaminated, without me being aware of it.

I minimize that possibility by just going further back in
my series of backup files, until I reach an un-contaminated
clone, then junk all my _recent_ clones.

Remember, one compressed version of my 60 GB Vista
partition is less than 3GB in size, so I can store many
Vista versions.

Now this brings up another point, "creeping corruption"
of the whole image chain of backups, over time.

I sidestep that by leisurely building up a duplicate chain of
backups from scratch. In other words, I start the duplicate
chain by installing everything from original DVDs, do all
my tedious program configurations, everything, without
ever exposing the "duplicate chain" of backups to the internet.

In the unlikely event where the main chain of backup files
become hopelessly contaminated, I discard the entire chain
of backups, and substitute the duplicate chain of backups.

Sure its a lot of work, but backup in general is a lot of
work, so backups pay off big time, when they are
really needed.

In an emergency, it takes me 40 minutes to completely
restore both OS 10.5.4 _and_ Vista Ultimate to their
original pristine condition.

No app' configuration needed, no "re-activation" needed,
no re-partitioning needed, everything just works.




Only thing that can sink my boat would be a RAM failure.

....but hey, that would cause grief with any backup scheme.




3) Last but not least, a TM restore does you no good
if you have a Vista partition on your drive.

Again, not to worry, few Mac users presently take
advantage of Vista apps, even though some of those apps
are much better than similar apps available for the Mac.

I'm satisfied with XP, which works under VMware.
(Although I think Vista does, too.)

Vista is a real PITA, but the dopey hospital administrators
are all falling victim to $MS panic-talk about abandoning
Windows XP. In fact, as of last Monday, $MS will not
supply XP to retail stores, so XP is drying up.


Only real annoyance I have here is trying to control my
home "Vista Macs" from a distant hotel room.
(remember, I need Boot Camp speed)

Temporary bad approach is to resort to either Parallels
or VMWare, and put up with half-speed operation of
the home Mac.

Timbuktu, which works well on XP, will not work
very well with Vista.

Mark-

Can't think of a vast solution, only a half-vast one.
.

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