Making Tech Lemonade Out of Tech Lemons

#rodecasterduo #podcast #microsdcard #backupsoftware

shitty photo by author

I’ve recently taken a vow of poverty and started spitting into a tube.

In other words, I’ve recorded a few episodes of podcasts, some which will be released publicly; some which have already turned into “lost tapes”.

In aid of this effort, I finally got a sound mixer designed for podcasts–the RodeCaster Duo (pictured above).

Instead of relying on software on one’s computer for recording audio, one can record directly on the RodeCaster Duo if one has a microSD card.

I ordered a 1TB microSD card from Amazon. When it arrived, I plugged it into my RodeCaster Duo and expected the gray REC icon to have a red ring around it indicating that the Duo was ready to record.

This did not happen.

I plugged the microSD card into my MacBook Pro. The MacBook Pro could see the card. Once re-inserted into the RodeCaster Duo, the REC icon refused to don its red ring.

Rode has a list of recommended microSD cards. They even have a support page for topic Why isn’t my MicroSD card recognised on my RØDECaster Pro II/ Duo. Neither of these pages helped.

According to a webpage (possibly Reddit) that I can no longer find in my browser’s history, it turns out that the RodeCaster Duo doesn’t recongize high capacity microSD cards. What the highest supported capacity is, I do not know. I will remedy the problem by purchasing something less capacious with the help of a sales person who knows the RodeCaster Duo well.

However, since I already had the microSD card and since I had to eviscerate the packaging to get the damned thing out, there was no point trying to haggle a return.

But all was not lost.

I bought my MacBook Pro slightly more than a year ago. During that time, I hadn’t started backing the machine up because I didn’t have an external hard drive that was capacious enough to handle the 4 TB of the SSD, much less have capacity to back up more than a full drive.

Now, I’m nowhere near having a full 4TB of data to back up. But I wanted to make sure that I could have one full back up that size if I needed it. Ergo, I had my eye set on an external 5TB hard drive.

Why a hard drive (e.g. spinning platters)? Because SSDs and hard drives have different failure rates because of their different physical constitutions. Thus, there would be two opportunities to preserve data at two different retention rates.

## Multiple Backups
It turns out that you can have multiple backup drives for a single machine in Apple’s Time Machine software–the back up software that ships with every Mac.

Although I did recently purchase a 5TB external hard drive, it’s bulkier than a microSD card in a SD card adapter. The external hard drive needs to be somewhere flat where there will be no movement. And the hard drive takes longer to back up to because of having to wait for the spinning platter to rotate under the head to write data and then again to read the data back to make sure the write was correct.

But because the microSD card is faster and more portable, even though its capacity is only 25% of the capacity of the internal SSD, it is more than sufficient for running incremental backups of documents. Ergo, as I build my writing empire, I will have revert points automagically thanks to Time Machine.