Due to the recent critical information concerning the identity of Deep Throat, my previously scheduled coverage of our trip to California has been delayed. I really want to get to this, both so I can write about it while it’s fresh and because I want to finally write my “Pirates of the Caribbean” essay – It’s Walt’s last word, his valediction, and the news wasn’t good. Lucky for us, it’s a great work of art as well as a kooky summer thrill.

In miscellaneous other news, I just heard from Eric White, who has several pages of Walking Ruins videos online, and I will be heading into a major server upgrade soon.

The server upgrade will entail changing the Wallstreet’s “T-board”, a two-part component which is responsible for getting charge power to the battery, and swapping the current 10-gig internal drive for a 40-gig drive while mounting the 10-gig in an expansion-bay case.

Once I have that under control I’ll get to learn about the wild and woolly world of OSX drive duplication utilities via hard experience. An unfortunate characteristic of OSX is that GUI-level copies of mounted volumes may not duplicate all the dtat on the volume, a consequence of unix-style user management and permissions, and inversely, tarring volumes may not preserve old-style Mac metadata.

Thus, backup under OSX has remained an evolving practice.

I may or may not temporarily migrate my site content to my desktop machine (Socrates; the Wallstreet server is Bellerophon) and employ it to serve the material in the meantime – I don’t recall how far out of synch the two configurations are, but I doubt, for example, my gallery server at pix.whybark.com or the extended features of Movable Type will be enabled on Socrates.

(I saw that Ben and Mena, Movable Type’s developers, were asking for beta testers on mySQL integration, which I look forward to with anticipation!)

I believe my first stop for volume duplication will be Carbon Copy Cloner, discussed here on Mac OS X Hints. There was a roundup on backup for OSX on TidBITS recently, but their site search is down at the moment so no cite here.