As, seemingly, most of the rest of the world, I’ve got a (50GB subscription to) Dropbox. I use it in place of the ‘Documents’ folder on my MacBook Pro and, at work, instead of the ‘My Documents’ folder in Windows. Everything is kept in sync between the machines and it’s all backed-up in the cloud.

That’s all well-and-good, and three places to store data is obviously a good situation to be in. However, given the recent Amazon EC2 outage (Dropbox uses EC2) I’d like to have a local backup solution. Until 2009 my wife and I used to do this with the use of an Apple Time Capsule, but the incremental backups used to slowdown our laptops so much that we eventually sold it. Every now and again I’ll backup to a 2TB external hard disk, but that’s only when I remember.

I wanted something better.

After looking at our needs and the options, I settled on a Netgear Stora* and two 2TB hard disks in RAID1 configuration**. This means that data is written to both disks simultaneously – i.e. a Redundant Array of Independent Disks. It came in at about £170 all-told, which isn’t bad at all – especially when you consider that it’s got secure web access to the files it contains and is extremely easy-to-use.

Once you’ve spent 10 minutes getting the Stora up-and-running, you need a way to get files onto it. That’s as easy as drag-and-drop if you want it to be, but I want a more robust solution. As with Dropbox, after the initial backup I only want to transfer the files that have changed. Enter rsync – or, more accurately, arRsync (Mac only). The graphical front-end is simple and effective. I refused to pay $40 for the privilege of the (admittedly widely-acclaimed) ChronoSync.

*Other NAS drives I looked at have bittorrent functionality. This can be enabled on the Stora by looking here or here.

**This isn’t a techie post, so if you want to read about RAID, I suggest this post on Wikipedia.

Anyway, as I’m becoming accustomed to doing quite a lot, I reinstalled everything ready to return the Macbook. If it was going to be taken away I didn’t want it to have my details, saved passwords, etc. on it. I reinstalled OSX Tiger (10.4) as that is what came with it originally. Lo and behold! The flickering problem was gone.
So I’m sticking with Tiger. Not just because of that, but because:

• The ‘quick look’ feature is useful, but not earth-shattering
• Cover Flow is just eye candy
• I like the way Leopard auto-connects to my NAS (Network Attached Storage) but I can always do it manually or set up an AppleScript
• Leopard can’t print to my Lexmark all-in-one printer/scanner/photocopier. It’s not just that it can’t wirelessly print – it doesn’t print to it at all!
• I don’t use Time Machine anyway; I use JungleDisk.

Anyone want to buy a copy of Mac OSX Leopard? One careful owner, etc.

When I was at school my teachers used to tell me that I would go one step too far and ruin my work. Although I was never great at art and tech, they would (quite rightly) point out that the useless mess in front of me was the result of just going beyond the point at which I should have been satisfied and stopped. It would seem that impulse to tinker hasn’t left me…

Since last year we’ve had a NAS drive attached to our wireless router. The modded Xbox I bought from eBay 18 months ago is also connected via ethernet to the router:

This gives wireless access to the NAS drive from anywhere in the house and, as the NAS drive, router and Xbox are in a cupboard underneath the TV, allow us to watch DivX movies and TV programmes (via Xbox Media Center). It’s a great setup, but I had to tinker, didn’t I…

The outcome I was trying to achieve was that of this post: How To: Turn Your XBox Into An AppleTV. I was half-way there: I had the startup video and the skin sorted out. It was looking peachy. But that wasn’t enough. I wanted to get rid of the ‘flubber’ animation that comes up when you boot the Xbox. You know, this one:

Trouble is, that involves modifying the BIOS. Now you’d think with a name – sorry, acronym – like that (Basic Input Output System) I’d take more care. But no. I ploughed straight in and now I just get the hardware equivalent of a nonchalent French shrug-of-the-shoulders every time I try to boot it up.

Guess what I’ll be doing with my evenings next week whilst Hannah and Ben are in Devon…