Duality

Duality is both my workhorse and my oldest computer. It replaced a G3/266 Minitower in 1999 or 2000. It started life as a 350 MHz machine, but then swapped processors with Quadraplex to become a 400. It's original 128MB of RAM has slowly swelled to a gig, and it's storage capability is still growing. Right now it houses four internal drive - two 80s and a 40, with an 80 gig firewire drive shared between itself and Singularity. The two 80s are hanging off an ATA/133 card for some real nice speed, and had been a mirrored RAID array and my boot disks for quite some time. Early in the 03/04 school year, both drives failed - with just enough lag between them that I was able to rescue almost all my data to the 40 gig drive (applications, data and music. OS didn't fit).

I didn't trust the hardware RAID they were in since it meant that if this ever happened again and it was the card's fault, I wouldn't be able to hook them up to anything else to rescue the data. Instead I used Apple's software RAID. No perceptable speed hit, but when I found that the mirror was out of synch I ran into a big, big problem. I reformatted the bad drive and attempted to re-mirror the data. After finishing, the machine just sat, spinning. I let it sit for over 24 hours with no change, and then rebooted it. I figured that it certainly would have had a chance to get itself straightened out by then, no matter what. and even if it hadn't, it ought to only be un-mirrored but still have my data on the good drive, since that's the point of RAID. I was wrong. Instead, the partition was completely hosed, and no utility that I could find could see anything. I had to reinstall everything, and the videos and music that weren't on Singularity fell into the void of Nothingness. So my 27 GB of music was pared down to the 12 gigs on my iPod. That was the only real loss in the ordeal. I've been running off the 40 since then, leaving one 80 for music and the other for video work if I run out of room on the external (since I can bring it to EdTech, where there are faster machines and DVD burners, video projects usually live on the external drive).

Right now the 40 is partitioned into two 20s - one is where everything is, and the other is going to be a dry run for Debian, which will then be cloned to my server. whenever I get around to doing that. This machine will also play host to my backup solution, whatever that may be. I'd like to roll my own, but if I'm going to involve Cinque, I think Retrospect would be the best solution considering the cross-platformness. I plan on rotating two 250-ish gig drives on a weekly basis, with nightly incrementals around 6am. we'll see how that works out. I might also drop the money on an SATA card so the drives I buy can go into my next machine too.... we'll see.