Posts by Scott

Backing It Up

iso50-backups
Regular backups should be an integral part of any creative’s computer workflow, unfortunately it seems to be neglected by a lot of people. It seems like an easy thing to do given that the alternative means betting your life’s work on the health of your hard drive but I guess it’s sort of like flossing or taking vitamins. As I’ve recently come to realize, fear of hardware failure isn’t the only reason to backup; fire, flood, theft, and user error all threaten to rob you of your hard earned intellectual property. I’ve always taken backups pretty seriously, but I have had some close calls and a very recent one has compelled me to adopt a more robust backup solution.

Some years ago — shortly before I finished my first album — my main data drive experienced a mechanical failure. Luckily I had a backup drive sitting right above it. So I bought a replacement for the original drive and went about installing it. As I was putting it in the case I accidentally dragged a screwdriver past the IDE pins on the backup drive (which was at that moment the only intact copy of all my work) in just the right way to arc the power connector and fry the controller board. At that moment I thought I had lost everything I ever did, the new album, and my sanity. Luckily the damage was isolated to the control board and I was able to pick up a similar drive and transplant it’s controller and recover my data. I learned a hard lesson that day and every since I’ve been more careful about backing up.

Fast forward to last week when it had recently occurred to me that I should have off-site backups. In a city like San Francisco, fire is a big concern and all the backups in the world can’t help you if they’re sitting in the same place as your data when it all burns to the ground. So I started leaving my backup drive at a friend’s house and bringing it home during the day to backup work from the previous night. The problem is that two weeks had passed since the last time I brought that drive home and backed up. So last week I was partitioning a disk during a Windows install and accidentally deleted the primary partition of my main data drive and that past two weeks of work. Fortunately, Partitions are relatively easy to restore (Active@ makes a very powerful data recovery suite) so this wasn’t a huge deal, but it definitely gave me flashbacks of the near catastrophe I had experienced years earlier and got me thinking I needed to start using a new system.

James E. Gaskin defines a good backup system as “Automatic, redundant, and restoreable” and I would like to add off-site to that list. The system I was using until today only covered only two of those bases. Now, I would love to use an online backup service — it would solve all of these problems — but I have about 1.5TB of files that need to be mirrored and a typical night of work will generate around 2GB of new files and/or file changes which need to be backed up. Every online solution I’ve seen would end up being ridiculously expensive at these sizes and given that my Comcast internet upstream is less than 1Mb/s, it’s really not practical if I need to move a lot of data, which is more often than not. Given all of that I’ve ruled out online backups until they bring fiber into my neighborhood or the cost of the services come way down. So I’m left with simply scaling up the backup scheme and using multiple traditional drives. The system I ended up going with is laid out like this:

1. Main data drive: A RAID5 array with three 1TB drives. This is the main drive that I work from and where I store all of the work. RAID5 uses rotating parity so that even if one of the drives experiences a failure a copy of all your data can be rebuilt from the two remaining drives. Reading and writing data from/to a RAID5 array is also much faster than a single drive (sort of like a redundant version of RAID0 – more info here) so it’s a nice bonus to have this as the working drive.

2. Local backup drive: One 2TB drive which is mirrored from the main drive every night. I use Backup Magic to do the mirroring. It’s light weight, powerful, and best of all: it only runs when I tell it to. I don’t like automatic backup apps that run in the background, they always tend to overstep their bounds and eat up system resources.

3. Off-site backup drive: One 2TB drive in a hotswap SATA bay (similar to this). The plan is to pop this in every week or so, mirror from the main data drive and then take it back off-site for safe keeping. Even if both local drives fail or my house explodes or something, at least I don’t lose my entire life’s work.

Just a note: This backup scheme is for my PC, on my Macbook Pro I use time machine to backup to a single external drive but the problem is that there’s no redundancy. If both drives fail, you’re screwed.

It’s easy to forget that as computer based creatives, everything we’ve ever done, all of our intellectual property, is sitting in a little metal box and there are a lot of things that can go wrong with that box. Regular backups are a must and off-site backups are highly recommended. I know the system I’m using isn’t foolproof — I guess nothing really is — but I feel a lot more secure knowing the data exists on three drives in two separate locations. How about you, what system do you use to backup? For all you Mac users, is Time Machine enough for you or do you have a secondary system in place? Anybody using an online backup solution? (and if so, what size is your data?) Let us know the comments

Lettering Art In Modern Use

Raymond_Ballinger_DSC_6932-590x392
Raymond_Ballinger_DSC_6965-590x392
Raymond_Ballinger_DSC_6945-590x392
Raymond_Ballinger_DSC_6973-590x392
Sébastien Hayez’s Designers Books blog has a great post on Lettering Art In Modern Use and various other design-related books. I love that last one; I was at the printers the other day looking at some samples and they showed me a letter-pressed wedding invitation with that same script style. It was embossed into the paper with inlaid gold leaf, so nice.

Via Surfstation

SSD Upgrade Phase 2

Three 120GB OCZ Vertex SSD's bundled up

Three 120GB OCZ Vertex SSD's bundled up


After last month’s foray into the wonderful world of SSD’s via my newly super-powered Macbook Pro, I decided it was time to take my main tower PC to the next level. It wasn’t an easy decision at first, but it soon became a lot easier when two of the four drives in my RAID0 Photoshop swap array went down (for more on RAID, see my earlier post on the subject). I also had a very large format project beginning the next day and was dreading slogging through it with plain old HDDs. So I had two choices:

1. Go the (much) cheaper route — around $300 — and replace the drives in the array with two new ones of the same, ye olden tymes HDD variety.

2. Take the plunge and buy SSD’s at around $400 a pop.

I’ve made the mistake in the past of skimping and then regretting it later and I am finally starting to learn my lesson on that one. After all, computers are the central element in my professional life and how I make my living. With that in mind it’s easier to justify the large expenditure, as long as the performance gain is substantial enough. And was it ever. I’ve fallen for performance gimmicks and hype here and there in the past and have been disappointed time and again. This wasn’t one of those times.

When I built this particular machine I decided to go big with the processor and got what was at the time a the state-of-the-art Intel Q9650 Core 2 Duo Extreme. I didn’t really skimp on the rest of the components either, it’s definitely a solid rig. Still, I always felt it wasn’t living up to it’s full potential, especially considering the coin I dropped on it originally. Lately, when things are moving slow or just not acting right, I’ve caught myself considering building a new machine. Considering how recently I built the thing and how much it cost, this is just ridiculous. This was supposed to last me a while and be — to a certain degree — future-proof (which, in the computer world, means about 3-4 years). So it sort of came down to spending the $2500 to build a new tower or spending $1200 to make the existing one faster. In light of my experiences with the SSD and my Macbook Pro, I came to the conclusion that the best course of action was to replace the old HDD’s with SSD’s.

I ended up settling on a three drive configuration: One dedicated drive for the OS (Windows 7 RTM 7600 — which has been working out amazingly well) and two drives for the RAID0 array. The Windows drive is clocking in at around 245MB/s (over six times as fast as the average I/O on my old HDD) with a .1ms seek time (which is off the charts fast). The RAID array with just two drives is running around 480MB/s which is significantly faster than the four HDDs I had in there before.

All the numbers are great but there’s a lot more to the story than just raw I/O performance. The drives have removed the one big bottleneck that was left in my system, allowing all of the other components to reach their full potential. The performance increases I’ve seen go far beyond what you might expect from just a faster disk drive. It’s like a whole new computing experience, I feel more able to experiment and a lot more confident about overall stability. I almost feel like the computer used to choke on big data read/writes and would just finally crash. With the new drives it just rips through anything and never really hits that tipping point where things lock up. This new found stability could also be due to the fact that I installed the final RTM version of Windows 7 when I put in the new drives. I had been using the beta, which although very stable in it’s own right, didn’t quite compare to what I am experiencing now.

The bottom line is that SSDs are the real deal. Yes, they’re still expensive, but if you work with computers and very large files, you owe it to yourself and your workflow to look into what they have to offer. If your rig is feeling sluggish, getting a SSD to perk it up might actually turn out be a bargain when compared to the price of a new machine. Of course, a more pragmatic person might wait another year or so until the numbers come down, but I didn’t really have that luxury this time around. I’ll be posting the detailed data next week once I get a chance to do some more tests. The next step is to split that Windows drive and install OS X. If only they made Sonar for Mac I’d make the switch.

Tycho/Ghostly Seattle Show Update

gho10corr
As some astute readers pointed out in the Tycho Live in Seattle post, the event is not quite as “free” as originally stated. I checked in with the organizers and apparently only the lobby area — where Michna and Lusine will be playing — is free. The auditorium show — where The Sight Below and myself will be playing — is actually $10 (unless you have a Decibel Fest pass in which case it’s included).

The event is the opening gala for this year’s Decibel Fest, you can get tickets here. I’ve heard they’re almost out so get on it if you haven’t already.

Sorry for the confusion, see you out there!

Scandinavian Logos of the 60’s & 70’s

3875402902_e9211d3b83
3857724893_b31ea40558
3852974751_b3845aa994
3852972815_7ca8626baa
3858514872_598d8ee0f7
3874819373_e8ff88cdfb3863052314_95b996cac2
3853529083_d755f9c0ba3854156216_ca2f8021ed
Some very nice scans of 1960’s and 1970’s Scandinavian logos from Oliver Tomas’s Flickr. As great as these logos are, it’s always amazing how much better things look when scanned from a well printed page. The texture and imperfect edges really take it to the next level.

Via Oliver Tomas

Braun Catalogues

Braun-Design-M.JPG
Braun-DesignTax5-M.JPG
Braun-Aspekte-M.JPG

Some very nice vintage Braun Catalogues from Thimet. Looks like Braun’s influence on Apple extends beyond just hardware; I’m pretty sure that last one came with my Macbook. The site also has some great shots of classic Braun calculators (bottom of page) —one of which you will recognize if you’ve ever used the iPhone calculator. My favorite will always be the ET11 though, which clearly influenced the Omron 86R’s design.

Rock Band Abbey Road Commercial

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpQkEF4WhJk
This is one of those things where I am in awe of the technical achievement but the whole idea behind it makes me want to drive off a cliff in a ’78 Blazer playing Sgt. Pepper’s on 8-track. It’s easy to say John Lennon would be rolling over in his grave if he saw this, but then again time does funny things to people. At any rate, The Beatles have always been idols of mine so this is still a treat, even if it is some cynical alternate reality where they’ve all been recast (two posthumously at that) in their prime as hucksters for some half-assed video game cavorting around with Hollywood-extra hipster stereotypes and generally making my whole childhood feel nauseous.

Anyways, it’s worth a watch as long as you hit stop right around the 22 second mark at which point is devolves into the zombie-mation 3D stylings that are the reason Rock Band makes me cringe. Although it could be worse, far worse.

Via Sorry Mari

Ghostly Discovery 1.05: International

ghodisc
The Ghostly Discovery App has been garnering all sorts of praise and even more downloads since it’s July launch. When we first posted on it a lot of you had noted that it was not available overseas. Well the announcement just came down that with the release of version 1.05, the app is available internationally. The best part is that it’s still free! Get yours now

Swisscom Rebrand: Second Look

swisscom-identity-1
swisscom-expression-15
swisscom-identity-21
sc
swisscom-identity-14
swisscom-update-1

After writing last month’s post on the Swisscom rebrand film I stumbled across this page at Moving Brands’ site containing the images you see above. I have to admit that it cast the project in a whole new light for me. I still can’t say I’m a fan of the core logomark in all it’s gradient-clad glory, but on a large scale across various formats I think the branding system is very strong. I’m really enjoying how the logomark works in 1 color mode, looks sharp and far more focused. At any rate, I just thought these photos were great and really capture a nice aesthetic that I hadn’t fully appreciated the first time around. And of course the hot air balloon seals the deal. There’s something about well designed hot air balloons and sails; that’s about as good as it gets. Swisscom should all pitch in on a yacht and make a badass sail with the logo on it and they could all wear these.

I noticed some people weren’t too keen on the logo when I last posted on it, do these images change your mind? Let us know in the comments

Tycho Live 9/24 – Seattle

ISO50-GHO10SEA-Oscar

Ghostly 10 Year Seattle handbill


I’ll be heading up to Seattle later this month to Play the Ghostly 10 year show at Decibel Fest. Last year was great so really looking forward to this one.

You can see the flyer for the show above. I went with a slightly modified version of the Chicago poster / Ten Year Print to change it up a little. With this one I was going for more of a flyer/handbill feel as opposed to a poster.

Here are all the details, hope to see you out there…

Location:
Seattle Art Museum
1300 First Avenue
Seattle, WA United States

Performing:
Lusine
Tycho
Michna
The Sight Below

September 24, 2009
6-9 PM All Ages
$10 Buy Tickets

Ghostly celebrates 10 years at this years Decibel Festival.
The 2009 edition of Seattle’s Decibel Festival takes place September 24th through the 27th, and Ghostly is kicking it off at the SAM for the opening gala on Thursday the 24th.

Tickets and Info