ODAY I would like to explain, in a relatively shallow level of depth, my most basic backup routines. I will concentrate on a somewhat simplified perspective and that which involves my current backup approach for local files, as opposed to the Web. The method is largely automated, owing to cron jobs (scheduler-driven). More details and method were described in older blog items. For example, have a cursory look at:

• One-Click Backups
• Powerful Backup Scheme
• Basics of Data Recovery (XHTML presentation)
• Mail Backup and Restoration
• Backup Fallacy
• RAID Redundancy

At present, I continue to seek and stick to a robust backup mechanism that is rather immune to human error, as well as hardware failures. I take the ‘stacked backup’ approach (keep several cumulative/progressive backups) and I always remain paranoid, as to be on the ‘safe side’ of things. I fear (and maybe even loathe) situations where I might lose data as this costs a lot of time and can even lead to considerable emotional pain, especially in the case of irreversible loss. As a result, I have scripted all my backup routines. I can just set it all up and thereafter forget about it, so frequency of backups can be increased without extra cost (time). I would like to share a few commands that I use in this blog post, for whatever it’s worth. Here are bits referenced from the crontab file, as well as some corresponding and related scripts.

First of all, here is a command which takes all the settings files (beginning with a dot) and puts them on the external storage media, datestamped. It’s possible to go further and compress (e.g. using gzip), but it makes the entire process much slower.

tar -cf /media/SEA_DISK/Home/Home-Settings/home-settings`date +%Y-%m-%d`.tar ~/.[0-z]*

Here is a simple way of preparing a datestamp-named directory.

mkdir /media/SEA_DISK/Home/`date +%Y-%m-%d`

I then take all files to be backed up, slicing them into volumes of 1 gigabyte (the filesystem will not accept files that exceed 4 gigabytes in size).

tar -cf - /home/roy/Main/BU|split -b 1000m - /media/SEA_DISK/Home/`date +%Y-%m-%d`/Baine-`date +%Y-%m-%d`.tar

Lastly, important files that change frequently are copied without any compression.

cp -r /home/roy/Desktop/ /home/roy/.kde/share/apps/kpilot /home/roy/Main/MyMemos
/home/roy/Main/kpilot-syslog.html /media/SEA_DISK/Home/Misc_local #local

I prefer to send copies of these files off-site as well, just for the sake of redundancy.

konsole -e rsync -r /home/roy/Desktop /home/roy/.kde/share/apps/kpilot
/home/roy/Main/MyMemos /home/roy/Main/kpilot-syslog.html
/home/roy/public_html roy@baine.smb.man.ac.uk:/windows/BU/Sites/SCG #and remote

In the above, Konsole is just a convenient graphic-textual wrapper for these operations that spew out status or flag errors, shall they ever emerge (a rarity).

I use tape archives to retain nightly stacks. Every night I use rsync to replicate my main hard-drive and to avoid the existence of deprecated files, I create a fresh copy twice a week, using rm -rf followed by scp (could be rsync as well, in principle) and a storage unit whose total capacity is 0.3 terabyte keeps stacks of the files before each rm -rf operation. Here are some bits of code which are hopefully self-explanatory.

konsole -e rsync -r roy@baine.smb.man.ac.uk:/home/roy/* /home/roy/Main/BU/ &

For a fresh copy of a remote home directory, begin by erasing the existing files.

rm -rf /home/roy/Main/BU/*

rm -rf /home/roy/Main/BU/.[0-z]*

Then, copy all files using a simple remote copy command.

konsole -e scp -r roy@baine.smb.man.ac.uk:/home/roy/* /home/roy/Main/BU/ &

The stacked backups that are dated get deleted manually; and quite selectively so! One should permit reversal to older states of the filestore by leaving sensible time gaps between retained backups. This prevents backups from being ‘contaminated’ too quickly. Important files are often replicate on file/Webspaces, so the most I can lose if often less than one day’s worth, due to hard-drive failures that are physical. The files are kept on 3 separate archives in 2 different sites in Manchester (home and the University; used to be three sites before I left one of my jobs). All in all, I hope this inspired someone. If not, at least it would serve as a page I can reference friends to in case they seek something similar.

More tips on *nix-oriented backup can be found in a recent article.

I found the following article quite fascinating.

Songs we hear as teenagers tend to remain lifelong favourites because they become hardwired into our memory during a critical time, a memory conference has heard.

[...]

“You recall more memories from the period of 10 to 25 [than previous or subsequent periods] and the bump has a peak between 16 and 20,” he says.

“The brain works at its optimum in that period. It’s a sponge and it soaks up everything.”

To name just a few songs that will remain with me forever: “Tonight” by Blackstreet and a couple of renditions of “I Can’t Go for It”. I tend to associate — mentally that is — album covers with certain songs that eternally stay in my head.

NLY a few days ago, Netscape and AOL offered money for people to participate in their on-line portal. Having created a Digg copycat, they were willing to pay some generous sums of money for influential Diggers to defect and help create a larger and healthier community elsewhere. The cited article views these recent events in a rather objective way.

Dollar signs went off in the blogsphere Wednesday, as blog pioneer and recent Netscape recruit Jason Calacanis offered up to $1000 a month to woo volunteer posters away from popular reader-generated link sites like Digg and Reddit.

[...]

“I’m just surprised that he feels like he had to steal people away from Digg,” said Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief at SearchEngineWatch.com. “Certainly it’s starting to feel forced now. He’s looking for leaders in his community. None of them have emerged apparently, so he’s hoping to bribe them away from another place.”

[...]

Will the cool hunters in the Digg community take the bait? Reached via e-mail, Digg’s second most popular user, Dirtyfratboy (also known as Henry Wang), told Wired News that he was torn.

“Mr. Calacanis shows up this week and informs the world that users can receive payment for their work. I’ve stayed by Digg’s side ever since the 2.0 birth, but I’m in real pain right now. I would rather break my arm than to dismiss Digg, but my college tuition doesn’t pay for itself.”

Even to me this was tempting. Out of curiosity I got in touch with Calacanis and tested the ground, so to speak. They seem interested at the time, but this truly conflicted with my principles. It would also be awkward, if not a poor strategy altogether. Paying people to do what others already do voluntarily? A couple of days later this led to quiet riots by existing Netscape.com fans. So, I imagine the plan has been fully conceded by now.

The best find du jour is the following set of Linux commands and their real responses in the shell. Below is a snippet.

Actual UNIX commands and responses…

% make love
Make: Don’t know how to make love. Stop.

% got a light?
No match.

% sleep with me
bad character

[....]

have always said that I would never write blog content while drunk or even tipsy. I think I made the exception only once. Today I have a compelling reason to make an exception, too.

I have just returned from the night club and, on my way back, I witnessed a violent scene (although I did not see it frontally or directly). An innocent Northern Irish man was assaulted by three bullies and then left lying unconscious on the ground, having had his mobile phone stolen. His head was visibly injured. I saw him lying there without moving while other witnesses fled the scene. Soon afterwards I had the ambulance and the police come to assist. I spent about an hour with them, providing evidence.and rough description of the criminals. I am yet to be contacted for further information by the police (or at least that’s I was told by the officer).

But here comes the scary part: as I was leaving the police vehicle I was yelled at by a bunch of guys whose appearance resembled the criminals. I walked back home through an alternative route watching my back like a paranoid. I don’t expect to sleep well tonight. It’s 3 AM and I need to wake up early for work. Quite unnerving. The policemen said that they had captured those three who assaulted, but I begin to doubt it. They could have lied to find reassurance. In fact, now that I think about it, I will go downstairs immediately and phone the police, again. They could not have found the criminals as quickly as they arrived at the scene of the incident.

UPDATE (after phonecall): it seems possible that they only captured one or two of the criminals (probably one).

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

nice old writeup from Tristan Miller (someone whom I first met on UseNet) explains why it is a poor idea to send Word files. I explored his site at deeper levels in the past as his opinions broadly intersected with mine. I also happened to find this funny ‘scientific paper’ with an hilarious followup.

Returning to the subject at hand, the true nuisance is mail that contains Word attachments. It is a plague that appears to be reaching its end. Funnier (or coversely — more annoying) experiences include the embedment of nothing but plain text (or even a single image) in a Word files which is attached to a blank-body message. Some people just never learn. Here are some effective E-mail signatures that I have come across in the L_yX mailing list.

I do not have a copy of Word, Excel, or PowerPoint.
I have no plans to buy one.
Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint use proprietary data formats,
encouraging consumerism by forcing us to purchase new licenses
every time they “upgrade” their secret formats.
Send plain text, rich text format, html, or pdf instead.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

Or a shorter version thereof (one which honours the 4-line signature limit)

Please avoid sending me Word or PowerPoint attachments.
Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are unreliable, unmaintainable, and unsafe.
Send plain text, rtf, pdf, or W3C html instead.
See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html

There is now the ODF argument as well. ODF has recently become an ISO-approved standard.

NE thing that keeps striking me as surprising is that people’s habits supersede all logic. I will provide an example from technology.

How can anybody argue that drive A for floppy disk and C for primary hard-drive is more rational than the rhetorical and self-explanatory /dev/floppy/ (for floppy device) and /dev/hd0/? This comes the prove that it is all just a matter of habits. People refuse to accept new things that they are not already used to, irrespective of their reasoning. In fact, the hierarchy of a computer (abstraction) in the *nix world is far more robust. It may also be easier for a new user to ‘digest’ and everything stems from the root of a single tree.