"Neck deep in data" -or- "My burner kicks ass"
Ok...so I'm writing this in Deepest Sender from the laptop via our neighbors wi-fi because my computer is busy and its easier to hop on our neighbors wireless than run a cable to where I'm sitting. Right now, my Mac is burning the last DVD backup of my external firewire hard drive. For the last 3 days I've been backing up everything on my external drive to prepare to partition it because of problems I've been having with my computer recently.
The back-story...
I was begining to have allot of weird problems with my Mac. I couldn't change some of my Firewall settings (Windows Sharing specifically, it kept telling me there were errors reading the preferences from disk and none of the usual measures like repiar permissions worked) as well as some other generally strange behavior and I decided to start over with a fresh installation. I backed up all my data to the external drive and formatted the internal drive. I decided to try something new and partition the drive. One partition for the system and another for my data. In the hopes that if something happened later, I could simply back up a few files from the sytem partition, wipe it and reinstall then be back up and running in no time. Since I had never done this before, I set it up with 5 gigs for the sytem and 50 for my data and installed Mac OS X on the 5 gig partition doing of course a custom install to eliminate useless wastes of space like 30+ language localizations I'll never use which automatically cut the space needed in half. After rebooting and beginning to copy everything back to my internal hard drive I realized that 5 gigs was too small for the sytem partition with everything I wanted to put back in it (library items and things that have to be in specific directories to work). Mostly because I started getting "Your startup disk is almost full" messages. So again, I repartitioned the drive. This time with 10 gigs for the system and 45 for my data.
Since my Applications folder was 10 gigs alone before I started, I knew that I would have to split it up into 2 folders one on the sytem drive and one on my data partition...sacrificing the convenience of OS X's shortcut to the applications folder and the simplicity of "one stop shopping" to open a program. After begining to copy everything over for the second time, I once again started getting the startup disk messages. I tried moving some items around to remedy the issue but things kept feeling messier and messier.
Now finding myself in a bigger mess than I had originally, I pondered my options. I resigned not to partition the internal drive the third time around because among other things, I prefered to have one Applications folder and for all my data to actually reside within my home folder. All of which would be on the same partition as the sytem. Thereby negating any possible benifits of having multiple partitions. That still left me without an easy way of doing a clean install of my OS if I had more problems without losing my data.
So I turned to my giant 250 gig external Firewire drive. I use it for backup purposes already but it's a bit cumbersome to manually copy all the folders over to it and, afterwards, just as cumbersome to restore the data. Remebering that I had the handy little utility SuperDuper! yet had for some reason never used it, I asked myself why? .....when you use SuperDuper, it erases the destination volume and clones your source drive to it. My external drive was set up as one big volume and had 190 gigs worth of stuff I didn't want to lose. That is why I had never used SuperDuper. I should have set up the firewire drive with a backup partition when I first plugged it in but I didn't have the forethoght.
Which brings us to present time--that disk burning in the other room whicih is probably finished by now. *Runs in the other room for moment. Partitions firewire drive 60gigs/and starts copy.*
Since it was now apparent that I needed to partition my external drive and that I would prefer my boot drive be one big volume, there was one big obstacle--the 190 gigs of data that stood in my way of formatting the drive. Funny how it turns out that I need to backup the drive I used for backups.
I had basically 2 ways of backing up the drive, copy as much data as possible to my iPod and the internal drive, and burn the rest. Some things made more sense for one method or the other. 28 gigs of music? Hard drive. 87 gigs of ripped DVD's? Burn them off, one by one. I burned about 12 or 13 movie DVD's. I filled up my iPod with files I was storing on the external drive that I didn't want to burn on a disk. System folders like my Library, Applications, and home folder went to DVD's....I have a whole spindel full of DVD's now and I took the oportunity to delete alot of duplicated files and stuff that should have been gone long ago.
Right now I'm copying things to the external hard drive from the internal drive so I can again, format it...this time as a single volume. Perhaps the most impressive thing is that in the last 3 days, the computer hasn't been turned off and for most of it, it's been runnig with less than 100 megs of available disk space. All without crashing--though it did remind me that it was runing out of space after it finished burning every disk. I doubt Windows would be able to stay running for as long without any problems. And as for disk burning, I've seen more coasters from PC burners than I've ever had from my Mac and burning like 10 DVD's in succession with no coasters or overheating of the drive. That has to be some sort of accomplishment. My iMac has a Pioneer optical drive in it by the way...good drives apparently. Thank you Apple for using quality components. Well, I think this is going to have to end my rambling. It's managed to keep me busy pretty much the whole day while the Mac was doing it's thing. It's time to go in there and reinstall one last time. If you've managed to read this whole thing, congradulations and I applogize.
The back-story...
I was begining to have allot of weird problems with my Mac. I couldn't change some of my Firewall settings (Windows Sharing specifically, it kept telling me there were errors reading the preferences from disk and none of the usual measures like repiar permissions worked) as well as some other generally strange behavior and I decided to start over with a fresh installation. I backed up all my data to the external drive and formatted the internal drive. I decided to try something new and partition the drive. One partition for the system and another for my data. In the hopes that if something happened later, I could simply back up a few files from the sytem partition, wipe it and reinstall then be back up and running in no time. Since I had never done this before, I set it up with 5 gigs for the sytem and 50 for my data and installed Mac OS X on the 5 gig partition doing of course a custom install to eliminate useless wastes of space like 30+ language localizations I'll never use which automatically cut the space needed in half. After rebooting and beginning to copy everything back to my internal hard drive I realized that 5 gigs was too small for the sytem partition with everything I wanted to put back in it (library items and things that have to be in specific directories to work). Mostly because I started getting "Your startup disk is almost full" messages. So again, I repartitioned the drive. This time with 10 gigs for the system and 45 for my data.
Since my Applications folder was 10 gigs alone before I started, I knew that I would have to split it up into 2 folders one on the sytem drive and one on my data partition...sacrificing the convenience of OS X's shortcut to the applications folder and the simplicity of "one stop shopping" to open a program. After begining to copy everything over for the second time, I once again started getting the startup disk messages. I tried moving some items around to remedy the issue but things kept feeling messier and messier.
Now finding myself in a bigger mess than I had originally, I pondered my options. I resigned not to partition the internal drive the third time around because among other things, I prefered to have one Applications folder and for all my data to actually reside within my home folder. All of which would be on the same partition as the sytem. Thereby negating any possible benifits of having multiple partitions. That still left me without an easy way of doing a clean install of my OS if I had more problems without losing my data.
So I turned to my giant 250 gig external Firewire drive. I use it for backup purposes already but it's a bit cumbersome to manually copy all the folders over to it and, afterwards, just as cumbersome to restore the data. Remebering that I had the handy little utility SuperDuper! yet had for some reason never used it, I asked myself why? .....when you use SuperDuper, it erases the destination volume and clones your source drive to it. My external drive was set up as one big volume and had 190 gigs worth of stuff I didn't want to lose. That is why I had never used SuperDuper. I should have set up the firewire drive with a backup partition when I first plugged it in but I didn't have the forethoght.
Which brings us to present time--that disk burning in the other room whicih is probably finished by now. *Runs in the other room for moment. Partitions firewire drive 60gigs/and starts copy.*
Since it was now apparent that I needed to partition my external drive and that I would prefer my boot drive be one big volume, there was one big obstacle--the 190 gigs of data that stood in my way of formatting the drive. Funny how it turns out that I need to backup the drive I used for backups.
I had basically 2 ways of backing up the drive, copy as much data as possible to my iPod and the internal drive, and burn the rest. Some things made more sense for one method or the other. 28 gigs of music? Hard drive. 87 gigs of ripped DVD's? Burn them off, one by one. I burned about 12 or 13 movie DVD's. I filled up my iPod with files I was storing on the external drive that I didn't want to burn on a disk. System folders like my Library, Applications, and home folder went to DVD's....I have a whole spindel full of DVD's now and I took the oportunity to delete alot of duplicated files and stuff that should have been gone long ago.
Right now I'm copying things to the external hard drive from the internal drive so I can again, format it...this time as a single volume. Perhaps the most impressive thing is that in the last 3 days, the computer hasn't been turned off and for most of it, it's been runnig with less than 100 megs of available disk space. All without crashing--though it did remind me that it was runing out of space after it finished burning every disk. I doubt Windows would be able to stay running for as long without any problems. And as for disk burning, I've seen more coasters from PC burners than I've ever had from my Mac and burning like 10 DVD's in succession with no coasters or overheating of the drive. That has to be some sort of accomplishment. My iMac has a Pioneer optical drive in it by the way...good drives apparently. Thank you Apple for using quality components. Well, I think this is going to have to end my rambling. It's managed to keep me busy pretty much the whole day while the Mac was doing it's thing. It's time to go in there and reinstall one last time. If you've managed to read this whole thing, congradulations and I applogize.