Archive for December, 2005

We’re nearing the end of the year (less than twelve hours in my time zone) and it has become time to write down some final random notes.

• There’s some interesting things going on with regards to tuning in sIFR 3, see these experiments. Of course there’s more info on the mailing-list.

• If you hang out at the coolest webhosting company around (a.k.a. TextDrive), there’s a TextMeet being organized next week in Utrecht. See the forum topic for more info.

• Laurent Haug, whom I met at Reboot last June, is organizing his own conference in Geneva early February. I won’t be able to make it, but check it out: Lift06.

And with that, all the best for 2006!

As you are hopefully aware, backups are the only way to make sure you don’t lose your data in case of a crash or theft or an other disaster. There are several ways to back up your data, such as writing it to a tape-recorder stuck away in a fireproof vault.

Luckily there are easier methods as well.

My personal strategy is as follows: I keep one full backup of the PowerBooks hard drive on an external Firewire hard disk. Furthermore, I upload my documents and work (anything I code, basically) to Strongspace.

There are two programs I know of for the Mac which do full disk backups. One is Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC), the other is SuperDuper. I’ve used CCC for a couple of months, and I’ve recently bought a SuperDuper license. Whereas CCC seems to be aimed at users who know what they’re doing, SuperDuper is clearly for the folks who don’t and/or want assurance that the backup is really working. The interface is clear and consise, and the User’s Guide (pdf) is useful even if you don’t use SuperDuper. Please note that the risk of buying the application after reading the guide is significant. You’ve been warned.

My Strongspace backups are done by means of a combination of Ruby, rsync and SFTP. You can download the script here. It will allow you to upload specific directories, and it lets you exclude files and directories on a per directory basis. It will also remove files from Strongspace which no longer are on your disk. You can follow instructions on setting up a scripted backup at Invisible: Back-up. Instructions on my script are in the script itself.

And finally, there’s scheduling. You need to schedule your backups so you won’t forget making them. Please do as I say and not as I do, because I don’t schedule mine. I usually make a full backup before I take the PowerBook with me on a trip longer than the bycicle ride to university. If I’m not travelling for, say ten days, I’ll also make a backup. The Strongspace backups are made at least once a day, usually before I hit the sack. This means the latest stuff will have been backed up, no matter what time I go to sleep.

Luckily I haven’t needed my backups yet, but at least I’m prepared. I hope you will be, too.