Personal Blog of Mike Bowden

We’ve recently been having quite a few clients that have been interested in getting their files backed up and secure. This is a topic that has always interested me and I’ve done a lot of research in the past in order to get my backups setup, secure, automated and fail-safe. I’m going to go over my backup solutions and what I’ve done in the past that hasn’t worked for me.

When I first started to have files that needed to be backed up I started out with what I had at the time. Without having a secondary hard drive to rely on and no money to pay for online backup services (which weren’t even an option at the time, non existed or they were very expensive), I decided to use the only thing I had available to me. At the time I had more Cd-R’s than I knew what to do with, mainly because I burned my own music from the ever growing collection I had amassed on my computer.

This was a form of backup for me, because if I lost it on the computer than I had a CD that I could re-rip back into the computer and the other way around. Other files were backed up to Cd’s as well until they would get out dated and/or damaged, which happened very often. Cd’s aren’t a great medium to use for backups in the first place, they don’t have a very long life span before the data will start degrading and in some cases can’t even be accessed at all. After I got my Mac Pro, I decided that I would install a few hard drives to use for backup purposes.

Current Work-Station Setup

Mac Pro with side panel off.

Brand and Model
Model Name:    Mac Pro
Model Identifier:    MacPro1,1

Processors
Processor Name:    Dual-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed:    2.66 GHz
Number Of Processors:    2
Total Number Of Cores:    4
Total Combined Processing Speed:    10.64 GHz

Memory (RAM)
Size:    7 GB
Type:    DDR2 FB-DIMM
Speed:    667 MHz
ECC Status:    Enabled

Graphics
Chipset Model:    NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT
Bus:    PCIe
PCIe Lane Width:    x16
VRAM (Total):    256 MB

Displays
Left Display:    ViewSonic Graphic Series VG2230wm Black 22″ 5ms DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor
Right Display:    ViewSonic Graphic Series VG2230wm Black 22″ 5ms DVI Widescreen LCD Monitor

Hard Drives
Bay 1:    WDC WD2500JS-41SGB0 (250 GB) SATA 3.0Gb/s
Bay 2:    SAMSUNG SP2504C (250 GB) SATA 3.0Gb/s
Bay 3:    ST31500341AS (1.50 TB) SATA 3.0Gb/s
Bay 4:    ST3500630AS (500 GB) SATA 3.0Gb/s
Bay 1 & 2:    Striped RAID Set SATA 3.0Gb/s

Ok, enough about my system. The above drives are raided together in a Striped RAID setup. This allows the drives to function as one and I have both drives working in tandem, so I get double the speed on my writes and seeks. This helps because I work with a lot of large files and really need faster drives than what I have, but they suffice for what I currently do.

In order to backup the 500 Gigs of those two drives, I purchased a 500 GB hard drive to use with Time Machine, once I upgraded to Leopard. I soon outgrew this and didn’t really like the idea of my files being on the same drives as my operating system, as it caused bottle necks when working with larger graphics. So I decided to purchase a 1.5 TB hard drive. This drive became my new Time Machine drive and the 500GB drive became my Repository, which houses all of my files.

So here is how my backup system works on the Mac Pro.

Dual 250GB Hard Drives – Operating System, Applications and any other files that run on a regular basis.
500GB Hard Drive – Used as my file repository; all of my work files, documents, pictures, music, movies and so on go on this drive.
1.5TB Hard Drive – Used as my Time Machine drive, all of the above drives use the one 1.5 TB as a backup drive.

The above setup is for in-house use only and has worked great for the past 8 months now. Having such a large amount of space to revision my backups with Time Machine allows me to recover files that were deleted, lost or renamed months ago. This has saved me a number of times and I will never be able to function without having a system such as this.

Now, what happens if something happens to the computer itself? Well I have a way to protect against lightning strikes and/or power surges. First I have a whole house surge protection system installed, if you don’t, do it. They are cheap and your power company will normally spread the payments out over a few months and it’s only around $20 to get them to come out and install it. I think total the system cost us roughly $150, but over 3 months it wasn’t much at all. The next thing I use is a UPS system, that has a very nice surge protection system built in. This saves me from power outages, surges and a number of other problems. This has saved me roughly 30+ times since I’ve purchased it, just from random outages with our power company, storms and the like. I roughly have 5 minutes to get my files saved and my system shut down, then the batteries die.

To cover myself from a fire or other natural disaster, I use online backup services. I used Mozy for the longest time because they offered unlimited space for a great price. Only problem is they have a very bad Mac application and I decided to switch. Now I haven’t been with them for roughly 5 months now, so it is possible that their application is much better, it was in beta when I used it. I moved over to iDrive, which has a great Mac application, but I was paying the same price as Mozy but only got 150 Gigs of space, needless to say I filled that pretty fast and made the decision to move to another company.

While I was searching for companies I decided to give a company a try that is very similar to Mozy, but didn’t have a Mac application at the time. Lucky for me when I was ready to switch, they had in fact released their Mac app, Carbonite. I have been with them now for well over 4 months and I am extremely happy. On my account I currently have around 200 Gigs backed up, with another 300 in the pipe to be uploaded. I keep mine throttled on my system, simply because I work on the web daily, as well as the other 3 adults in my house. So I can’t consume all of the up bandwidth and kill everyone’s bandwidth. I also run a few company servers here as well as a gaming server, which all require bandwidth as well.

My wife has a Carbonite account as well and she has loved her as well. She runs her flat out, mainly because her computer houses all of our family photos and videos, so we wanted to make sure it backed up quickly and also so it backups up fast when they are uploaded to the computer so those files are safe. Currently I have a server running here at the home office aptly dubbed “Obtuse”, which is my companies full time backup server. All of our web servers (A few in the Texas DC), as well as some of the office servers all backup to this one server. I have purchased a pro license for the Linux version of an application called Crash Plan, which runs full time on Obtuse. In a few days I will be setting up all the other computers in the house with this application (which is free for the standard version) and those computers will backup to Obtuse as well. So this will give me another layer of protection, which is still in-house, but having multiple copies of the same data, even in the same place, is better than 1.

So to re-cap. Get a backup system in place and automate it. There are applications for Windows that act the same as Time Machine, you’ll just need to do a little digging to find them. I don’t know of any free off hand, but Retrospect is a paid one that I’ve used in the past and works great. If you don’t want to spend any money, get with a few of your friends and have them all install Crash Plan, it works on Windows, OS X and Linux. Once they’ve got it installed and you do as well, invite each other to backup to your computer. Give them a little bit of space and get the same amount from them, then your computers are backing up to each other and it will be remotely and FREE. The files are all encrypted so no one will have access to the files and vise versa, it’s completely safe. There isn’t any excuse these days to not backup your files.

If anyone wants or needs any help with setting up a backup plan, post a comment and I’ll do my best to help you out. I’ve worked with a lot of the backup software on the market today and if I haven’t, I have all major operating systems installed on my Mac Pro with VMWare, so I can install them as well and help you solve whatever issue you have.

So we recently finished our demo with Kate McLeod over at Streamtime. We’ve very impressed with the way the applications runs, functions and the features that it has. We really haven’t had a chance to go through it as much as Kate did with us during the demo. So when comparing Streamtime with Studiometry I thought they were very similar in features and function, but now I see that Streamtime has FAR FAR more features and functions than Studiometry and is definitely a winner over Studiometry in my book.

Don’t get me wrong, Studiometry is a great application and it has its place, but that place isn’t with us and what we need in our company right now. Streamtime defiantly is however and we’ll be looking into getting a license or two with them in order to expand our company. Streamtime is probably the end all solution for any design, development or IT firm out there that handles large scale projects or on-going clients. The price tag is a bit steep for us right now, but the price does seem to be justified as you are getting a license for the FileMaker Server and getting client applications to connect to that server.

Streamtime Work Flow

Basically the work flow within Streamtime is very similar to how we do things in our company currently. It simply gives us a central location to store all of that data and information. It’s also a central place to retrieve all of that data, run numerous reports and gather any information we’d like out of the application with a few clicks of a mouse.

I’ll list all of the features that we’ll use within Streamtime below. There are more features than what is listed, this is simply what we’ll use and in the order that we’ll use them.

• Contacts
  • Correspondence
  • Notes
  • Maps
  • Directions
  • Active Quotes
  • Active Orders
  • Work in Progress Jobs
  • Invoices
  • Budget
• Job Quoting
  • Tenders & Orders
  • Tasks
  • Quote Notes
• Job Tracking
  • Job Schedule
  • Tasks
  • Task Schedule
  • Task Gantt
  • Projects
• Job Invoicing
  • Job Details
  • Invoice Summary
  • Quote
  • Time & Materials
  • Purchase Orders
• Live Reporting (This is where it gets fun)
  • Client Contact Report
    A report that shows the details of correspondence items which have an active reminder event found within the date range specified.
  • Client Contact History Report
    This report shows the correspondence history for a contact.
  • Sales by Sales Code
    An invoice sales history returning cost price, sell price and gross profit for each Client Manager by Client Sales Code.
  • Sales by Client
    An invoice sales history by client showing Client Manager, total costs, sales and profit.
  • Client Budget by Month or Year
    A summary report of the clients budget screen in Contacts for a specified client by month or year.
  • Quoted vs Actual vs Invoiced
    This report gives the totals from the Job Invoicing Summary Screen listed by Job showing totals for Quotes, Time and Materials plus PO’s and invoices that have been generated against a job over a date range.
  • Quote vs Actual
    Allowing you to compare quoted Time and Materials and Costs to Actuals and see how effectively your staff are quoting and working on jobs.
  • Timesheet Weekly Summary
    This report shows a staff members timesheet for a seven day period from the start date specified.
  • Timesheet Billable vs Non-billable Summary
    This report shows the total hours and percentage spent by each staff member on billable and non-billable work in the date range searched.
  • Company Profitability Report
    This report shows a break-down of the income for each cost matrix CAT.
  • Client Profitability Report
    This report shows a break-down of the income of each Client by cost matrix CAT.
  • All Client Income Report
    Utilize this report for a summarized understanding of what your client returns.

Overview

As you can see from the above, just for the main features we’ll be using in the application, that it has a massive amount of features and functionality. We feel that it will be a perfect fit for our company and will allow us to budget, quote and manage projects much more reliability than we have been before, not to mention we’ll be able to be more accurate with our estimating and quoting in the future. We’ll have access to all previous jobs and be able to go through and copy items and expenses over as needed to new jobs that require the same type or amount of work.

All in all we feel that the application contains everything that we need in one and will make things much easier for us in the long run. Again the price point is a bit steep for some, but there is still a lot that comes with the application to combat the price. Maybe they would be willing to work with us on the price or give us a discount, who knows. Only time will tell.

So here lately I’ve been having problems with one of my Windows XP VM’s. When I resume the VM from a suspend, the network doesn’t seem to want to work. I’ve tinkered, edited and patched all I could but with no avail. After dealing with it for a few weeks I finally have come up with a way to resolve the issue. It’s really simple and I’ve done in multiple times and it seems to work each and every time.

Get Windows XP VM Network Back After Resume

1. Resume your VM
2. Go to your Network settings
   • Start
   • Settings
   • Network Connections
3. Find your Local Area Connection
4. Right click and Disable
5. Wait for it to finish
6. Right click Enable
7. Wait for it to finish
8. Right click Repair

Once it finishes repairing the connection, simply hit close and then close the network connections window. This should make your bridged network connection start functioning again between the VM and OS X. Hope this helps, took me a little while to find the right combination, but this works for me every time.

If anyone has a fix or another way to resolve this issue, please by all means let me know. I’d love to find a resolution to this issue so I don’t have to bother with it anymore or maybe another way to fix it when it does happen. Doesn’t hurt to have multiple ways.