themonkeysdidit

Everyone should backup their data. We all know it, but how many of us actually do it? Well until today, I didn’t. But I knew I should so I began looking into various solutions.

First off , you need a lot of space for backups, and however much space you have now, won’t be enough a few years down the line. So all the free online services were out as space is pretty dismal.

Secondly, it had to be cheap. It is for home use only after all so fire proof data centres are hardly required.

Thirdly, it has to be automatic, otherwise you just don’t bother or forget to run your backup and that’s when disaster strikes.

So what did I decide? As of early this year I use a mac book pro as my primary home computer, which means it comes with the excellent Time Machine software, perfect for my needs. Next problem was where to tell Time Machine to store the data. I could use the server in our house but this doesn’t guard against fire, theft etc as presumably both laptop and server would suffer the same fate. So I bought a 1TB USB drive from amazon and back up to this. The clever(?) bit is the disk is actually kept in the office at work and I only bring it home once a week (ish) to run a back up before taking it back to work the next day. Thus I have 1TB of off site backup storage – awesome.

And how did I get a network speed of 1456MB/s? Well, it takes about 12 minutes to get from home to work on my bike, so with the disk in my bag, that’s 1TB of data transfer in 12 minutes, which equates to about 1456MB/s bandwidth (all be it with horrible latency )

I like to think I have a slight  scrap of talent when it comes to all things geeky. I’m proud of the fact that out of my desktop computer, two servers and my wife’s laptop, not  a single one runs Microsoft Windows. And  they don’t  all run the  same stuff either. My desktop and one server runs linux, the other server runs Solaris 10 and  my wife’s laptop runs Mac OS X.

The downside of all this showing off is that sometimes, things are just that bit harder than they should be. (See Installing bibbleLite on gentoo for example). Also, the original install of wordpress (powering this site) wasn’t easy because of the complete lack of a half decent graphical ftp client for linux. Now don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of them about but they either take ages for recursive actions (kftpgrabber) or crash after about 5 minutes (gftp). So the upgrade of wordpress to the new 2.7 didn’t fill me with a feeling of joy. First off I’d have delete the old files, secondly I’d have to upload the new files and then, migrate all the content to the new site. Just for added complication, I decided to make this undertaking while down in Southampton, away from my home desktop using an unfamiliar PC where time constraints would also be an issue. What can I say, I like a challenge.

Imagine my surprise then when the whole thing (from downloading 2.7 to the laptop I was using to checking the new site was working) took a whopping 5 minutes! The major speed increase was from using cyberduck ftp client for the mac. Recursive deletes and uploads were so much quicker than when using the linux clients, why can’t a quick, easy to use and graphical ftp client be produced for linux? Then the actual upgrade of wordpress was a single click on the big “Click here to upgrade” link that automatically appeared. And lo and behold, the whole thing was completed.