Archive for May 8th, 2007

rdiff-backup is my backup tool of choice

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

I decided to actually get backups going. I know, laugh. But I bet that when you snicker, you may also not have a great backup system in place.

Picked up a 160GB 2.5″ disk and an external casing. After careful calculation, it seems like maybe I could have saved money buying a pre-packaged solution. Weird.

Anyways, the tool of choice - rdiff-backup. Its simply dead easy to use. Just do: rdiff-backup <current> <backup-path>. My initial backup of about 56GB of my home directory, it took just under 2 hours for the first ever backup image.

Restore is something a lot of folk seem to forget. They make great backups, but never test restores. I went cold turkey - moved from Fedora to Ubuntu after a backup. It worked.

Only real problem is that in Fedora, I had uid/gid 500, but in Ubuntu, I was uid/gid 1000. That’s easily fixable, I restored (rdiff-backup -r), and I have my environment exactly as per before the format (and distribution switch).

I probably should try to do these backups daily, and maybe have even more that one drive for backups, but this is me being very appreciative of rdiff-backup. Today I ran it again after over a week.

time rdiff-backup /home/byte/ /media/disk/byte/

real    288m40.943s
user    52m1.951s
sys     12m57.641s

rdiff-backup also works over the network. Those dreamhost accounts are now starting to look very interesting for off-site storage. Read the documentation and examples if you’re wanting to get up to speed really quickly. Its also OS X compatible. Now if only I found a sensible Windows backup system…

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Posted in Linux, OSSSoftware | 4 Comments »

bytebot.net gets plain jane html redesign

Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

I figured it was time to redesign, what was essentially 2004, on bytebot.net. Its 2007, so with the power of “badges”, I’ve made the site feel a lot more updated. I’m feeding photos from my Flickr account, last played music via last.fm (I’m not really big on their widget, but I’m trying hard to not have to parse rss myself), bookmarking via del.icio.us (with comments, so its also occasionally blog-like), and micro-blogging via Twitter.

The fact that I can still do all this entirely in HTML (with great help from JavaScript and some help from CSS), still amazes me - who needs PHP! For constantly static text, Apache does server side includes, something I’ll be using in due time, when I fix/template all the local content. I have to update the talks page (so many Impress files sitting all around).

Anyways, if you’ve got a Twitter account, I’m bytebot there. Who else is twittering?

Posted in Life, Usability, Web | 4 Comments »