muxer

I reviewed/designed/wrote backup software. All my laptops have two hard drives. Any important folders and automatically backed up (it only backs up changes (robocopy) – ultra efficient) every 20 minutes. Worst case is I loose 20 minutes worth of work. Full backup of all my data every nite at 2 AM. I plug the laptop into my domain and it gets backed up to several severs.

What I found after reviewing several of my wall street customers backup solutions, they were running backups but they never tested them. I generally loathe cliches, but this one is appropriate, Ignorance is Bliss If you haven’t tested your backup to verify you can recover files, you’re not really backing up.

My first presentation was on a paper I wrote (solving large Linear Algebra problem on the Cray XM-P v. the Cray-2 ). 2/3rds of the way thru the talk the director of a rival supercomputer center said, “That’s impossible, a Cray XM-P/24 cannot beat a Cray-2 on that class of problems”. I was too dumbfounded to respond before the packed session. Luckily for me a mathematician (German woman) stood up and said, “It’s possible because I/O is 2nd Order and computation is 3rd order.”

The was the first and last nightmare experience I had. I enjoy giving technical presentations.

RAID 0 (striping) is far more fun. To boot off the mirrored disk is very tricky to set up, but I’ve done it before. You’re better off to get a 2nd disk and write robo-copy scripts and chron jobs to back up what you really want.

Forget robo-copy, it might be easier to set up RAID 1IDE RAID cards are very cheap.