I’ve got an old Lacie BigDisk lying around which was rendered useless when the internal Fujitsu drives failed to spin up. This morning I decided to re-populate the Lacie with two Maxtor PATA drives.

The drives must be jumpered as Master and Slave. They mounted immediately but only as two distinct volumes, not spanned as originally shipped. This will work fine for my needs but if you want to span them as originally configured by Lacie, you’ll need a utility from Oxford Semiconductor.

Take a look at these posts from wwward and Prune’s Blog for photos and more details. If you have trouble finding the software mentioned (i.e.: uploadergui.jar) visit my Downloads page.

During my iPhone firmware update fiasco I had nothing but trouble getting a proper restore of my data. Some – but not all – of the applications would be restored using iTunes 9.

According to a post at Apple Support:

Although iTunes backs up most of your iPhone and iPod touch settings, downloaded applications, your audio, video, and photo content are not included in the backup.

Another post describes what is backed up with each version of the iPhone OS. The following is excerpted specifically regarding applications:

iPhone 1.1

• Application settings, preferences, and data

iPhone 2.0 and later

• App Store Application data (except the Application itself, its tmp and Caches folder)

iPhone 3.0

• Per app preferences allowing use of location services
• In-app purchases

What I’m reading here is that iPhone applications are not backed up in iTunes. This doesn’t explain why some apps get backed/restored while others do not. Nor have I found any backup/restore correspondence if the application was downloaded OTA versus purchased within iTunes.

Fortunately Apple allows you to re-download iPhone applications at no charge but this shouldn’t be necessary if iTunes actually backed them up.