Dan Benjamin recently posted about performing hard drive backups at Hivelogic, his weblog.

He uses a variety of methods. I thought I’d share my own methods, and while they are working now, I think I will expand a bit within the year.

For the sake of understanding how I do what I do, it’d be best to describe what equipment I have.

• PowerMac G5 tower (holds two drives)
• 3 LaCie HD (Firewire)
• Apple Timecapsule

I’d echo Benjamin and say that having a bootable clone of your drive is a good idea. SuperDuper!, a program I’ve bought, does a smart-backup feature which updates the clone image as often as you like. Before you start, however, it helps to have a second HD that is the same size.

So, if you are backing up a 750GB drive, you need a second drive of equal or larger size. Maybe not at first, if you only have 300 GB of files; but in theory, you’ll need something at least as big. You have to begin thinking, then, of acquiring drives “in pairs.”

I currently use the two internal drives in my computer to hold the Mac OS system, home folders, etc., on one drive; the iTunes folder on the second. I now use the 1TB Time Capsule (hybrid backup and Aiport Wifi router) to backup both drives. For now, it is adequate, but it is a short-term solution. Calculated in less than a year, this will be inadequate. The TimeCapsule uses Apple’s Time Machine software to backup everything.

I used to keep a cloned copy of the music drive on an external HD. But then it grew too big to fit on one drive. That is likely what I’ll do in the future: buy another HD for mirroring/cloning the media drive; use TimeCapsule to do the computer’s main backup.

Keeping cloned copies would be a luxury. Like Benjamin, I keep Mail loaded through IMAP with Google Mail. It is of course also backed up on the computer through it’s own backup on TimeCapsule.

Other options for more storage include devices that hold multiple drives (NAS, Drobo, RAID systems), and of course, a new computer chassis (the 8-core MacPro holds 4 internal drives). I’m excited at some point to load up a new computer with a smaller boot drive (320GB) that runs at 10K or even 15K RPM. This would speed up the computing experience, for sure.

As more laptops make it into the home, I become aware that loading software on all your home machines is like maintaining a lab. I’ve also toyed with acquiring a 10-seat license for Mac OS X Server to use a technology Apple calls “Netboot.” This boots the computer off the server–all your applications are off a disk image stored on the server.

Your local client machine can hold files (i.e., documents), or your could even share them on a mount point on the server (everything is centrally stored). If files lived on the client machines, you could back each of them up to the centralized TimeCapsule. Future Apple products may include TimeMachine write to an OS X Server (mere speculation, but it would make sense in work environments).

Above all, I can say from experience, it’s important to keep backups of your work. I’ve known folks who keep everything on a flash drive “as the backup.” They may own all of 600MB of files that fit on a 1GB thumb drive, but that isn’t very wise.

Recommended backup programs I’ve used over the past few years:

• Carbon Copy Cloner
• Chronosync
• Time Machine (Mac OS X Leopard)
• SuperDuper!

I was quoted in an article that appears this morning in the State.

Of course, Dr. Morgan was our former superintendent who rallied behind our teacher blogging initiative. As many of you who read this blog already know, VoiceThreads aren’t special podcasts, but rather, are suped-up slideshows available only through VoiceThread.com. Their popularity stems from the fact that you can embed these multimedia creations into blogs, webpages, etc., just as easily as you can with other Web 2.0 multimedia, such as YouTube videos.

It was cool to appear in a South Carolina newspaper supporting what we do in Goochland County.

Tim recently posted about being Googley, and as much as I admire Google and all, I decided to read into the list for profound underpinnings.

As it turns out, these are good traits, no matter if you work for Google, want to be a good citizen, or simply want to change the lives of young people.

To paraphrase,

1. Focus on people,
2. KISS,
3. Engage,
4. Innovate,
5. Design for those outside your reach*,
6. Plan for today and the future,
7. Be worthy of our trust,
8. Human touch.

I think #10 is most important. It’s that #6 I want to spend just a couple sentences on, however.

Their #6 is design for the world, but I changed it slightly. When I design things in my job (a screencast, an after-school class, or a writing I do) I look beyond its immediate use. I don’t intend it just for my immediate, intended audience, but instead, a far-wider, far-reaching net.

After all, what I publish invariably ends up online. But shouldn’t we all aim higher, and take the extra effort, to make world-class things? If you speak of it another way, “Well for us here, I only would have to…”, you dumb it down.

I think one of the more important things I can do is share the fruits of my labor with more than just the 220 employees who are in instructional positions. Someone once said of me, “You’re always willing to share, you put so much of what you do out, online, for others to use.”

That’s right. I’m aiming for those outside my typical reach. And shouldn’t this be something we all go for? How are we to compete for the recognition of our ideas in an Internet-accesible age when our ideas aren’t good enough for a wider audience?

Be Googley. It can’t hurt.

I secretly covet the opportunity someday to teach a class to folks on file organization and workflow management. We’ve tried at my district, but not too many people want it. Or if they need it, they somehow don’t sign up. They like working unorganized.

My colleague has a method by which he makes folders for each month. He puts all the stuff for the month in there; if a project extends beyond the month, it makes the move to a new folder for the upcoming month. I never quite understood his system.

This hint, from November 07 shows off some of the power of the so-called “Smart Folders” in Mac OS X. With this tip, my colleague could store his files in more appropriate folders, yet still have the month’s last content at the ready.

Combined with tags, you’d have a pretty robust system.

Wow. This is significant.

Microsoft’s IIS servers have been hacked, sending malicious code to you through your browser, if you visit an affected website.

This report says perhaps over .5 million web servers have been compromised.

johnhendron.net uses the Apache web server.