A backup system Rube Goldberg would love
- About 9 years ago I had the chance to buy a (very) used IBM 701c, which I brought back to life and used as a terminal/fax machine for 5-6 years (I stopped using it as a fax machine when the power socket started to become unreliable; the battery has been long dead, so when I’d jostle the butterfly power would stop flowing and the machine would stop dead. And then it would have to (slowly) fsck when I got the power cable unjostled.)
- About 4 years ago, I bought a fistful of flash disks so I could build up some silent no-moving-parts low power computers. Well, most of those computers never materialized (the glowy server was the only one that got off the ground) and that left me with three little flash disks ranging from 1gb to 8gb.
- Last week, I was sorting through my (now tiny, thanks to repeated trips to ebay and the local computer recycler) pile of computer junk for things to sell and I found the flash disks. Now, used flash disks aren’t worth that much (if anything), but they are – unlike the loud whirring hard drive in the 701c – silent, and if I can’t profitably sell them I might be able to repurpose them. Like the 8gb disk, which is conveniently larger than the 4gb disk in the 701c.
So I decided to discard the 4gb drive in the butterfly and replace it with a nice quiet solid state disk. But to do that requires getting the data off the (no network connection) butterfly and putting it onto the new disk. And what’s the easiest way to do that? It’s probably not finding a macos port of the ext3fs (open source, and buggy as hell) file system, installing it on my Macbook Air, then attaching the old disk to an ATA to USB dongle, plugging it into the Macbook, and (after the obligatory kernel panic when a filesystem error was found on the root filesystem on the butterfly’s disk) tarring the contents of the disk up into ~orc/butterfly on the mac.
It’s likely to be worse putting it back onto the flash disk, because I’ll need to run lilo to make it bootable, and lilo does not have the most coherent documentation in the (already incoherent) Linux world. But when I get done with that, the 701c will be nice and quiet (and it doesn’t have a little fan either, so
it will just quietly sit there no matter how hard the 75mhz 486 processor is running) and I’ll be able to forget about the hoops I just had to jump through to move from one disk to another.