The one about backing up your stuff

Posted in Geek

nov

To go forward, you must backup.

I learned that the hard way, when I was still a tender n00b (…now, I’m a tougher one lol). Hard disk crash or some corrupted partition, recovered just a few docs… Fortunately it was mostly mp3s/movies I lost back then, no biggy (in retrospect). I remember the shock it gave me :’D

Nowadays, I back up my system with Time Machine. My univ docs (which I no longer have use for) are backed up on 2 different hard disks (1mostly for archiving, the other was more up to date). My pictures are also backed up on external hard disk as well as online on Picasa (and facebook, I’m not very concerned of keeping things high res, I’m no photographer). Songs and movies scattered around on hard disks.

My work stuff is what I’m the most paranoid about. I use Dropbox to autosync files online, I have a script which periodically rsync’s my work folders to an external hard disk, another script to rsync to a server on univ, and I also make use of Google’s project hosting service and svn co my stuff up. Not counting my time machine system backup lol

About svn with googlecode, maybe you remember from the article where I talk about free hosts and other free geek stuff, I mentioned univ’s proxy being a pissant. Well I had worked around that by svn committing rendered xml files and company to googlecode, and the server at univ would periodically pull the latest version and put it in its www folder. Is that bad practice? Anyway, I stopped that after a while, when I got the vpn tunnel lol .

I also like to keep my stuff neatly ordered (on my computer, not always IRL). That greatly helps for backing up, I find. If files are scattered around, you’ll find it difficult to get out of your way, look for them and back them up. If things are classified – important docs / code / pictures etc, things go smoothly for backing up! I’m talking of what I saw here

Also for work, I regularly back up the www folders, as well as the mysql databases.

One thing I didn’t see coming was that my host, Byethost, for my “junkyard” website might go down, or more rightly the mysql servers, because I could still access my files via ftp. I never backed up the mysql database for it Oò. Dans l’cul. Fortunately, my mac is also a test server, and all the xsl, js, css and xml data files were still on my mac (as well as on the ftp). I re-uploaded everything to Alwaysdata (turns out I simply have to turn on libxslt in my php configuration on the server ^^ – Symphony is heavily based on xslt ) and finally only lost an article (the intro one) and time to set things straight. My junkyard is now here.

Have any backup tricks you care to share?