Backups
I turned my computer on this morning and to my dismay my 9 month old 1TB harddrive could no longer be detected. It is still under warranty so it’s no big deal about the hardware going bad, however it is a big deal that I didn’t have a backup of anything on the drive. Fortunately it only consisted of replaceable content, however it will take quite some time and bandwidth to regain that content.
This drive failure emphasizes the importance of backing up my unrecoverable data, and I’m curious as to what methods other people use for backup. A few months ago I backed up a good amount of information to Amazon S3, however doing that on a regular basis is not the simplest task, and probably isn’t the best place to store sensitive information unless it’s encrypted. The other thing that’s important to me is synchronization between my desktop and laptop, of which the challenge is my laptop runs OS X and my desktop runs Ubuntu Linux. I currently use rsync to move files back and forth, however it’s not a good solution when I wish to delete or rename files. I also am considering using GIT to store version information which so long as only 1 is considered the master there should be no issues.
Also on a semi-related note, if you want to run make clean on any folder under your current one which contains a makefile for archiving purposes try the following command:
find . -iname Makefile -exec dirname {} \; | while read i; do make clean -C $i; done
Related Entries
Comments
Comment from Cheri @ Blog This Mom!
Time 2009/04/06 at 9:02 PM
Oh, and same thing, one day there, and then the next day, gone.
First Lucy, then Ethel.
Sorry about your data. At least I didn’t lose anything.
Comment from Bryce Boe
Time 2009/04/06 at 9:07 PM
Jeeze, I didn’t know you were on your third. That is a bit ridiculous. My storage drive prior to this one I had for 2+ years so it was about time for it to die hence why I got this one. I definitely wasn’t expecting it to die so soon, but I think the problem is only in the controller so I think (and hope) I can recover it all. After this I’m going to have two nearly identical disks and make sure they are always synchronized, that way if one dies I just need to replace that one.
Comment from Adam Doupe
Time 2009/04/07 at 10:12 PM
I use http://www.getdropbox.com/ to both backup and sync across computers. They just had a coupon for 6 months free Pro account (50 Gigs). Dropbox is cross-platform and works really well for me.
Here’s the link for the coupon in case you want to try it out:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=549878
Anyway, just yell across the wall if you want to hear more!
Comment from Bryce Boe
Time 2009/04/07 at 10:29 PM
Temping, however 50GB on S3 is only $7.50/mo and if I’m only storing 15GB it’s only $2.25/mo. Of course you have to include bandwidth with S3 but the majority of the time that’s just simple updates.
Comment from Adam Doupe
Time 2009/04/08 at 9:25 AM
True, but then you don’t get automatic syncing, versioning and web access. Well, I guess you could get all of these things, but you’d have to roll your own.
Comment from Cheri @ Blog This Mom!
Time 2009/04/06 at 9:00 PM
There is a conspiracy. I’m on my third external hard drive in just over a year.