Following up to Backing up to Amazon S3 using Amanda (June 28, 2008):
I’ve been having issues with both Amanda+S3 as well as JungleDisk. I’ll outline these here.
JungleDisk Problems
- JungleDisk sometimes destroys all of my data on S3 in the bucket JungleDisk uses and then on the next backup re-uploads all of the data! This is clearly a problem. Luckily I do not have more than a gigabyte of data thats backed up with JungleDisk. If I did this bug (or feature?) would be very expensive.
- JungleDisk doesn’t smartly handle moves. I’d like to be able to move things around on my local filesystem and have JungleDisk notice this and move them. Moving them over WebDAV isn’t feasible.
- JungleDisk scans individual files and doesn’t combine a whole bunch of them into one tarball. This gets very expensive! I wish they’d tar it all up first like Amanda.
Amanda+S3 Problems
- Sometimes the Amanda S3 device module has problems talking to S3. The only fix I’ve found so far is to destroy the bucket, remove it from the tapelist, readd the bucket, reidentify the bucket to Amanda and run amflush. This is clearly not good as it’s just as bad as Jungledisk destroying everything. I haven’t figured out why this happens yet.
Both products are still good and I’ll continue to use them. I’m considering using Amanda on my laptop, however, but this could cause problems in cases where it isn’t connected to the network at backup time.
Last week, like many people, I upgraded my MacBook Pro from OS X 10.5 (Leopard) to 10.5.1. Upon system reboot I was not able to log into my user account because the OS was complaining that FileVault wasn’t working properly.
Panic begins…
I had no backups. In fact the day of the fault I was pondering buying an external disk for the express purpose of Time Vault. Great timing..
I tried all of the things outlined on all the websites but nothing worked. I was on holiday so I didn’t have access to my Leopard or Tiger CDs. In the end I had to resort to DiskWarrior to recover the data.
The process went like this:
- Borrow an external USB disk.
- Backup FileVault sparse image.
- Attach the FileVault sparse image
- dd the filesystem from the sparse image to the spare USB disk
- Boot from the DiskWarrior 4 CD and attempt to repair the USB disk (it failed)
- Attempt to repair the filesystem image on the USB disk (it worked!)
- Reboot to Leopard and mount the fixed filesystem image and copy the contents to my mac
- Realise I made a mistake by copying to my user directory; make a lisa2 account
- Copy the data to lisa2, delete lisa account, recreate lisa account, copy data back
- Log in to lisa account, find all my data and reoice
The moral of the story is: Don’t be the first to upgrade.
I’m annoyed. Ever since I got my MacBook Pro several months ago I held out some hope that iSync in Leopard would support my BlackBerry 8800. Nope. Still unsupported.
I would imagine that Apple has kept the support out because of the iPhone. It’s obvious that RIM is in direct competition with Apple’s iPhone.
Oh well. I’ll continue to use mising sync for blackberry.
