Hackintosh & Macintosh consolidation

[7o4bwkan]

Over the years i have generally slapped in another hard drive when a new OSX version came out & dual booted until things worked; that way there was no chance of a non-functioning system. 

My hackintosh  has a GA-G31M-ES2L as motherboard and like 4 drives with different versions of osx. (some drives have double partitions with osx dual boot) 

Then i got a iMac and also have it dual booted with different OSX versions + some vm's with vmware fusion.

 

 

Ideally i would want to sell/trash everything and have nice Mac Pro with some kind of redundant storage to guard against disk failure with a whole bunch of VM's. 

That way if i ever need an old file / application i can spinup the right VM; open the right application & get what i need.

 

Basically i now do all my work on a macbook so it would be nice if there was a backup VM available on the mac pro server so if my macbook got stolen or damaged i would simply walk into a store, buy a new macbook, boot into recovery mode & with some terminal jijitsu restore the VM clone.

 

 

My question long term: 

  - is it easy to emulate/virtualize the GA-G31M-ES2L motherboard with plugin nvidea video graphics card?  (old osx version virtual machines running on legit apple hardware) 

  - basically i want to spend as little as time possible playing around in the disk image to make it compatible; i want to tailor the virtual hardware to the disk files since else i would have to mess with all these different osx versions; wasting huge amounts of time

 

My question short term

  -  i have never had a disk fail on me but i'm starting to get paranoid. 

  -   How do i guard against disk failure short term; as soon & as cheap as possible?

  -  are there solutions out there were i boot from USB & clone a whole encrypted hard drive image to for example amazon S3 using a simple gui? 

 - i guess i could use some usb RAID Enclosure and boot from that but that seems finicky 

- any other solutions are also welcome!

 

Or just let me know what you would do if you were in my seat & had the above setup & wanted to clean things up & guard against data loss.

 

PS. 

I've also been thinking about "lantronix spider kvm" i guess i could plugin that into the hackintosh  & perhaps not invest the  time to setup proper legacy virtualization. But i would still need something to guard myself against disk failure. 

[fffeee]

Can't speak to all of this but I use Arq from Haystack Software for encrypted de-duped off-site backups to Amazon S3, Google Nearline, Amazon Drive and folders on local media or my NAS. It also supports sftp targets. The licensing is easy, and there is an open source recovery tool should the software ever stop being maintained or whatever written in python on Github. 

 

You can configure it quite granularly, it supports all macOS/HFS+ metadata and restores it perfectly. You can also create different backup sets on different destinations, and you can do snapshot-style hourly incremental backups that age out to daily, weekly, monthly, yearly. I keep some stuff in Amazon S3 Glacier, others in Google Nearline and some on regular S3; my current working documents are archived nightly off-site but I do hourly snapshots locally.

 

My NAS at home is FreeNAS and I was a Solaris admin in a former life, so I prefer to use ZFS for redundant/reliable storage. There is OpenZFS on OS X which is a very good implementation for Macs and I use it on an iMac 5K Retina 27" and MacBook Pro at work with USB 3 devices and on my Hac at home with Thunderbolt/eSATA and occasionally USB 3 drives (usually just to duplicate or send/recv a pool snapshot)

 

You can't boot from ZFS but that doesn't bother me much personally; I am fine with jhfs+ for a system and application volume and just having my important stuff on ZFS or ZFS-backed jhfs+ zvols is safe enough for me. 

 

The TimeMachine service in OS X Server is pretty good; you can target ZFS datasets or zvols and easily enough recover a MacBook Pro's backup to a fresh disk. People do it all the time, I tested it once with one of the household MacBook Airs and it was without incident. The other nice thing about OS X Server is that goddamned caching server for iCloud/AppStore. It's awesome if you have a household of Macs and iOS devices. The software update service can easily balloon if you set it to defaults so I selectively manually fetch large OS releases and safebrowsing updates and things like that but don't bother mirroring all the voices and other one-off items that aren't used by every single device in the house.

 

On the Pro you have one good option for storage; Thunderbolt. Think about what filesystem you want to use, think about if you'll be early adopter of APFS or if you end to use Core Storage. Don't think you're going to use AppleRAID or something because there are already better options and it's likely to be pulled at some point in the near future. I prefer software like ZFS to handle devices but you can find Thunderbolt hardware RAID enclosures out there. I stick to JBODs or enclosures I can present the devices over those just because I hate hardware RAID unless I have the budget and requirements for single-vendor (e.g. spending more than USD$200k with someone like HP/NetApp/Oracle) — for my personal use I'm going to be using commodity hardware piecemeal and it needs to adapt and change over time or I end up being trapped in some legacy universe where I demand a PS/2 port, Snow Leopard, or a floppy drive to go along with my powdered wig and buggy whips.