Redundancy

[Chuck]

William, 

Like you my whole house runs on Xtension and when things fail it puts us into a tailspin. Because of that I am pretty anal about backups and have 5 on site backups and two off site. I use Carbon Copy Cloner to a external hard drive on my Mac Mini as the primary backup. I can just pick that drive to start from if the main hard drive fails. Downtime would be short. I back that up every 12 hours or after some major changes to the system so the copy is current. I have another Copy Copy Cloner HD that is only backed up every month in case I upgrade and find out that there have been some serious problems and those problems have been backup up to the primary backup already. Then I have two USB sticks that also used for backups, one copies the whole system and the other just copies the Xtension folder. The full backup is bootable but very slow so it is a last resort.

My off site backup is at my vacation home and I copy only the Xtension folder since backing up the whole hard drive would be pretty bandwidth extensive. The other is saved to iCloud.

As a matter of routine I have an Apple Time Capsule with a 6TB HD that I back up all my computers to so there is that also.

The backup system is an older Mac Mini that I retired a month ago and is still set up to run the house. All I need to do is hook it up and install the latest copy of the Xtension folder and I am good to go. Being that I can order a Mac Mini and have it the next day if needed is a good feeling but being that I have no control over that supply chain I don’t depend on it but it is an option.

As they say, there are two types of people in the world. Those that back up their data and those that wish they had.

Chuck

> On Apr 16, 2022, at 9:38 AM, William R Vogel <hightrailrider at icloud.com> wrote:
> 
> To start, I'm not bashing anyone with this, just passing on something I learned the hard way.
> 
> I've been running Xtension since it was supplied on floppy disk and would run on a 68000. ;) As the system expanded I became more dependent on it.
> 
> Then I had a catastrophic HDD failure on the PPC Mac that I was running at the time. It took me a while to recover and caused serious inconvenience during that time.
> 
> Coming from a telecom background, I remembered that all common equipment in a switch had backups, and inter-office trunks also had spares. Since Xtension had become something I depend on, I took a lesson from my telecom experience.
> 
> Some background: I've always run Xtension on dedicated Mac. This means that I'm fine with a 4-5 year old Mac for the job. (I often use the older Mini when I upgrade my desktop.) I can get a second, used, Mini for a reasonable price. I use a KVM and USB switch for the monitor, keyboard, and CM-11. Both Minis are connected to my LAN and can be accessed with screen sharing.
> 
> On a monthly basis I power up the backup mini in Target disk mode and copy the Xtension database to same. (Kinda stumbled on that one when the database moved to the Documents folder.) Otherwise I keep the backup Mini powered down to protect it from power issues.
> 
> Besides protecting me from hardware failures, this setup allows me to upgrade the primary system and let it run for a while before copying to the backup. So if there is a serious issue, I can just switch to the backup Mini, which still has the old software and database.
> 
> I hope this might be helpful.
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