After obtaining a new laptop one of the first things I always do is to make an image of the primary hard drive.  I then copy this image to another computer with a lot of hard disk space and leave it there as a backup should something ever go really wrong with the laptop.  There are a variety of tools both commercial and Open Source that make this process relatively easy.  The most well known tools are probably Norton Ghost and Acronis TrueImage.  In the Open Source world there are some decent alternatives such as FOG and PartImage.  Most of these tools have varying levels of intelligence that allow them to copy only the bits of the filesystem that are in use, dramatically reducing the amount of space that it takes to create an image.

I’m officially on the hook for competing in Iron April 2009.  It’s an interesting event organized by a real Ironman, Kevin Haugh, that takes loads of folks who normally don’t triathalons and convinces them to do the distance of an Ironman over the course of the month of April.  It’s an informal sort of competition where you’re motivated by the other folks who are also trying to accomplish the same thing.  There’s not prize for being the first person to finish, other than knowing that you managed to complete Iron April.  Each person has a page where they post their updates and progress.  I’ll be posting little short blurbs here.  In addition, sometime soon I’ll also create some sort of widget that I can use to post my overall progress on the sidebar of the blog.

As I mentioned in my previous article about using a Drobo as primary MythTV storage, the optimal solution for using a Drobo in MythTV is to record to an internal hard drive and then migrate the recordings later to the Drobo. When migrating recordings care is required because the recording could be in use, either as a result of someone watching the recording or because transcode/commercial flagging jobs are running on the recording. Fortunately, MythTV stores almost everything in a MySQL database, which makes it really easy to find out the status of a recording.