I’m running a pair of 500GB LaCie drives in RAID 1 set that got out of sync recently during a hardware failure that resulted in Apple replacing my logic board. I first noticed this because Disk Utility listed my RAID set as ‘degraded’. Simple enough to fix, I thought, and clicked the Rebuild button. Wrong.

Turns out there is a bug in Leopard’s Disk Utility whereby you must use the command line to rebuild degraded RAID sets. If you are getting the infamous ‘Unrecognized Filesystem’ error when you try to rebuild your RAID set follow the instructions below.

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RSync is an open source program that provides incremental file transfer for both local and remote files. RSync comes pre-installed on most unix and linux based systems (including Mac OS X) but distributions are available for most popular operating systems including Microsoft Windows (e.g. cwrsync).

This article will focus on how to setup a personal backup using one of the suddenly ubiquitous shared hosting companies like DreamHost, LunarPages or BlueHost. If you already have a account with one of these companies it won’t cost you anything to start backing up your data to a remote server. If you don’t already have an account and want to setup online backup you have two choices:

1. Forget RSync, save yourself some trouble - sign up with one of the online backup services like Mozy which is priced nearly identically to a shared hosting account.
2. Buy a hosting account and forge ahead - if you’re reading this you probably want to get your hands a little dirty and a shared hosting account lets you do all sorts of neat things like host your own domain, web apps, etc.

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