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| NAS Backup: 1,038,795 items found, 516 GB to copy by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 05/18/2013, 9:17am PDT | ||||
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| Last night before I went to bed I started a backup of all the files on my 1 TB Buffalo Network Attached Storage box now that I have a nice, big 3 TB desktop USB external hard drive. I was, shall we say, "itching" about the fact I had a lot of files on the NAS that I did not have backups of. But, I really didn't have any place to throw half a terabyte of files onto, so I needed some sort of backup system so that I'd have at least two copies of everything.
Some of you may remember, if you saw it, when I wrote about how I stupidly moved a machine about a year and a half ago, and knocked over the external hard drive that had the only copies of a lot of things I had because I'd forgotten that the backup disks were in the disk folder I wasn't able to save when I got evicted three years ago, and among other things I lost thousands of MP3 files I had of various songs I had, which, also, I no longer have the original disk since those also got lost in "the great eviction of 2009." Given that to be the case, I knew I needed to make a backup of stuff. In fact, I still need to image backup the hard drive on the Macintosh, if I can figure a way, I'll use a copy of one of the Linux Distributions on LiveCD for PowerPC I bought of eBay, then use DD to copy the drive contents onto the Buffalo NAS, then copy that over to the Seagate 3TB drive. (I don't know if I can load an NTFS read-write driver on Linux to allow it to access this drive directly when Linux is not installed on the Mac; that will have to wait until after the drive has been replicated first. That way if I screw up I can just image it right back onto the Mac and it will not notice the difference.) I think that it took probably over an hour for my Quad Core 64-bit Windows 7 ACER to index the Buffalo NAS drive in order to copy all the files off of it onto this drive. So, anyway, the drive is serving up files over the wireless network at a very respectable 2.13 megabytes a second. Thinking about it now, the NAS supports operation via the router or via USB, it might have been better to hook both of them up as USB and copy intra-machine instead of across the network. But, I don't have to move or change anything and the task just hums away in the background, I can still access the drive for other things and it doesn't cause problems in listening to music even though the drive is in use copying files too. So, anyway, after roughly 14 hours, it has 695,560 files and 460 GB of disk space left to copy. At some points it was copying as fast as 3-4MB/second, but at this rate, it's going to take about, ouch, Ten Days! Well, had I taken the time to do this earlier it might have been done sooner, but I didn't really have a place to put stuff otherwise. And, as I said, it's just going about its business running in the background, if it takes 10 days it takes 10 days. I think I'm going to write a program to provide interruptable backup, you start it at any time, it backs up all the files that aren't backed up, if you stop it, when you start it up again, it re-indexes your drive, then finds out what files are not saved and restarts from there. Then once it's done that, then it can check for files that have been changed. And it'll work for network drives. The hardest part was figuring out how to query the network to request all the public folders off a networked machine. Accessing a public folder on a networked machine is easy, it's getting the root directory of the network file structure that machine displays was the hard part; Explorer does it automatically but reading it from a program takes a bit of work. Not a lot, but it's not easy, biggest problem is if you point to a disconnected machine it's a synchronous process, your program is stalled waiting for network discovery to time out and realize the other machine isn't responding. I'm still trying to figure a way to have something like a timer issue an asynchronous interrupt so that if you don't get a response after 3 seconds you know the other machine is down or dead and you stop trying to read it and go on to the next machine on the network. Tried having the network inquiry started in a separate process and pass data back to the primary process, but that didn't work; it still seemed to stall / could not run asynchronously. |
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NAS Backup: 1,038,795 items found, 516 GB to copy by 05/18/2013, 9:17am PDT  Good News: It's got only one day left! by 05/19/2013, 5:48am PDT 2 Hours and 55 minutes remaining by 05/20/2013, 1:06am PDT Another point: Why do I need to use Linux to backup the Macintosh? by 05/19/2013, 6:09am PDT Correction: It is a Seagate drive, not WD NT by 05/19/2013, 6:12am PDT Of course it's a Seagate, you cheap motherfucker. NT by 05/19/2013, 2:23pm PDT Oh please by 05/20/2013, 1:42am PDT Every product must be reliable given the business hasn't gone bankrupt yet. NT by 05/20/2013, 6:04am PDT Hahahah. You're poor. And I did not read a word of that wall of craziness. by 05/20/2013, 11:44am PDT Because you don't have 10.5, the first version with Time Machine? by 05/19/2013, 9:46am PDT Re: Another point: Why do I need to use Linux to backup the Macintosh? by 05/28/2013, 12:12am PDT Re: Another point: Why do I need to use Linux to backup the Macintosh? by 05/28/2013, 5:26pm PDT |
