And still more on Windows Backups!

"Oh lord!", you say. "Is he still on about backups?"

Well, yes I am. My Windows strategy failed, and I had to regroup. To review (if people really care), here is my first post where I laid out my current thinking and strategy - super briefly I buy an external USB or Firewire drive and clone my computer's main drive onto the external. In that post I recommended a program called Acronis Home Image for Windows machines. Turns out that Acronis doesn't support something about the Boot Camp partitioning of an Intel Mac. I explained how to hack around that using Parallels in my second post. Then lastly I mentioned in the third post that Parallels had broken. This is the flaw with that backup strategy - if Parallels breaks you can't restore. D'oh!

So I looked around and found a solution. Even better it's all freeware! There's one key bit I failed to notice before, and that is you need to be able to boot and run the restore EVEN IF THE OS IN QUESTION HAS FAILED. So here I present a suite of tools that work on a Mac Pro with a hard drive split into an OS X and a NTFS Boot Camp partition. This has even been verified. I managed to screw up the networking drivers for Boot Camp as well while doing Registry surgery, so I booted from an external CD-ROM and restored my entire XP partition to fix it.

1) DriveImage XML. You can go ahead and install this just like normal on Windows XP. Run it periodically to clone your drive to the external drive.

2) Bart's Preinstalled Environment (Bart PE). This is some slick software. In a nutshell it slurps just enough of XP's installer to run drivers and some software. It uses that to burn a CD that can boot a limited Windows GUI - with the right drivers for your machine.

3) Once you have BartPE set up install the DriveImage XML plugin. Notice that this page talks about using WindowsPE, but it also works with Bart PE.

In a pinch you can boot the Mac Pro while holding down Command. If you have the Bart PE disc in the drive you can boot from it, mount the external drive and run DriveImage and restore the entire drive from there. Reboot again into Boot Camp and Bob's your uncle!

Not the most exciting article I've ever written but if you want to Boot Camp an Intel Mac, this is useful stuff. Wish I had figured it out BEFORE blowing up my XP install . . . .

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Pac-Man: CE and Band of Bugs

I had a longer post about Pac-Man: Championship Edition written on Thursday and I managed to destroy it before posting (sigh). I didn't have time to write another on Thursday, and honestly my patience level with recreating it isn't high. So I'll summarize. I expected to not be super-impressed with Pac-Man:CE, in part because Microsoft has been so heavy-handed with the marketing message. They keep saying that it's a "great gift to the world" which is such hyperbole as to be insane, and also that it's the first Pac-Man with different maps. The latter is somewhat true I suppose, but only in a hyper-technical sense. Every time I saw something about how it had "different maps" I would mutter "Great. Here on Planet Earth we've had Ms. Pac-Man for over twenty years." and ignore the rest of the blog post or whatever.

Well Pac-Man:CE's maps don't work at all like Ms. Pac-Man and they are pretty neat. The map is split into two halves and when you clear all the dots in one half a fruit appears in the other half. When you each the fruit the clear half-map changes to a new map and repopulates. So it's a much more dynamic experience than Ms. Pac-Man cycling to a new map every two-three levels. If you've been ignoring Pac-Man:CE because you've had enough Pac-Man, or because Microsoft dialed the hype machine to 11 give it a look-see. It's not earth-shattering, but it is a lot of fun.

Also, I got all the achievements in it so now I have two games I've maxed the achievements on. (I talked briefly about maxing Worms before.)

In other XBLA news I picked up Band of Bugs and like it so far. It screams "Final Fantasy Tactics", but there's nothing wrong with FF:T, and 8 player online multiplayer tactics is something I can get into. I suspect that next week I'll be lobbying for some multiplayer Band of Bugs on the gaming nights.


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Synchronicity

As of this writing TinyGod is still in flux. Windows XP is running again, and Parallels is running on it, but I can't get networking inside Parallels - the drivers for the virtualized network cards are screwed up. I've given up on it for now and sent in a support request. We'll see what happens. In the meantime I'm still having to reboot into Windows a lot more than I really like, but it's time to just buck up and get back to work.

One thing I've been meaning to talk about is synchronizing my desktop (TinyGod) and my laptop (Kool-Aid). This has really saved my bacon over the last week since I can do just about anything relevant on Kool-Aid. There are three components to this, and they are all really worthwhile to me.

The first is a .Mac account. I know if you're a long-time Mac fan you're outraged because they gave you a free email address and then later started charging for it. If you're a post-OS X convert like me your impression is probably that .Mac is a weak-sauce Google with less features that costs money. But I have a .Mac account for exactly one reason - syncing of Address Book and iCal across multiple Macs. (There are other things that sync such Keychains and Mail rules that are neat, but it's Address Book/iCal that is worth cold hard cash.) If I'm at the office in San Francisco I can punch in an appointment on Kool-Aid and know that it will be on TinyGod, probably even before I get home. This works great and it's in the background. It just happens, and I only have to worry about it if I'm doing something really fiddly with both machines at the same time.

The second is The Missing Sync. This allows syncing information between my Treo 700p and OS X. I have it on both Macs, but I usually run it on TinyGod. This is the other side of the link. I can enter an appointment on my Treo (say I'm at a friend's house and we're planning dinner) and it will make it's way back to TinyGod and from there .Mac will take it to Kool-Aid. The upshot is that all three devices have full read and write access to my contacts, Calendar, and To-Do lists (which come out of Kinkless GTD). If you have a Palm and OS X you should have The Missing Sync. Period.

The new piece of the puzzle is ChronoSync. Chronosync sychronizes folders. This may not sound like much but it has a robust ruleset and scheduler. What I use for is very powerful - I sync my entire Home folder every morning at 4 AM between Kool-Aid and TinyGod. The scheduler (which runs on TinyGod) is sophisticated enough to mount Kool-Aid's drive, perform the sync, and then unmount it again. So every morning I can start using either machine for a given file and it's all good. Days like today where I'm going to reboot TinyGod in another hour or so I can work on it until time to switch and then manually run the saved sync file to move everything over to Kool-Aid. My Kinkless GTD file (aka my entire freakin' life), my fiction projects, any source code I'm working on, even files on my desktop, they all move. NetNewsWire files tracking what feeds I've read update, etc. etc.

Now this is a bit finicky to set up I must admit. In particular the contents of ~/Library/ApplicationSupport is a bit tweaky. You don't want to sync machine-specific logs (but you DO want to sync things like Adium chat logs - doesn't matter which machine I run Adium on, I have access to all my chat logs). If you do something like run NetNewsWire on BOTH machines between synce you'll have to manually tell it to use one machine over the other on the next sync. But the power of being able to just grab Kool-Aid and work on a file and being confident that tomorrow it will be on TinyGod as well is fantastic.

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