miekec | One of those domino-effects

(looks like this entry had been sitting in my journal, just privately viewable, since August last year. Time to fix that!)

Last week, John's USB stick physically died quite unexpectedly. No resuscitation or reformatting fixed it.
He had no recent backup because ...
... there were some file name problems with the external USB harddisk we use for backing up ...
... which turned out to be even worse than we thought ...
... because we can't use that disk for backing up our Mac ...
... because apparently fat32 formatted disks can't save files bigger than 4Gb ...
... which of course Parallel files are if you use it to have a complete Windows install on it.

So, we had to re-format our file server drive to be HFS+ to make it read/write bigger files ...
... but then only a mac can read the disk.
Since we also had to deal with our wireless router misbehaving ...
... and having bouts of 30% or more packet loss ...
... and this being the 2nd or 3rd router we'd tried already ...
... we bit the bullet and J went to the apple-store to grill the geniuses on the Airport Extreme. To see if it might actually solve most (if not all) of our network problems...
...who knew a lot, but not the answer to some of our questions.

Epilogue: it seemed the best solution anyway, and after having bought and used it for almost 6 months now, we're quite happy with it. Yes, there are still some technical difficulties (aka problems), but it's usable. And reversing the fallen dominoes, we now have good backups that include the big files, even though only a mac can read the filesystem. We now have enough macs able to do so...

(Edit: 4Gb, not 4Mb. )