My week Monday 30 July to Sunday 5 August 2012 was dominated by the insanity involved in cloning hard drives and restoring my backup system to good working order.
Doing all of this over USB 2.0 interfaces was not helpful, but they were the only ports I had available on the loaner MacBook I’ve been using. Remember, I’m nomadic and quite often 100km from Sydney.
And then my backup drive failed…
Creating a new Time Machine backup of around 450GB of data takes 6 to 7 hours. Encrypting a 1TB drive takes nearly 23 hours. Even zeroing out a 750GB drive takes 5 hours.
And whenever you make a mistake, or a drive throws an error, you have to start that process again.
It’s been a wonderful lesson in patience. See, that’s the positive angle. Sigh.
Podcasts
- Patch Monday episode 148, “The politics of data retention”. It’s in the news because it’s one of the ideas being floated as part of the inquiry into potential reforms of national security legislation being conducted by the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security. The podcast includes Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan, national manager of high tech crime operations for the Australian Federal Police; Bernard Keane, Canberra corresponded with Crikey; and network engineer Mark Newton.
Articles
- An Anonymous attack in search of a purpose, Crikey, 30 July 2012.
- Six tips for developing a security culture, CSO Online, 31 July 2012.
- A dangerous cyber security disconnect, Technology Spectator, 3 August 2012.
Media Appearances
- On Monday I did a spot on ABC 105.7 Darwin with a couple of other people about overly-busy lifestyles, but the internet stream from which I was recording it was dodgy so I haven’t posted the audio.
- On Tuesday night I did another regular Balls Radio spot, but I didn’t record it. That’s probably for the best, it was rather disjointed.
Corporate Largesse
None.
The Week Ahead
I’m returning to Wentworth Falls on Monday, and have a day trip to Sydney on Thursday. In theory it’s a steady-paced week of writing. We shall see.
[Photo: Blue, being a photo of Wentworth Falls railway station on Thursday afternoon, one of the few bright spots in the week.]