Mike Hillyer’s laptop melting and backup fun at UC

Mike Hillyer’s Personal Web Space » Blog Archive » It’s Alive!!

Mike’s laptop went funny, but he had a backup of his presentation.

So, something about my backup strategy.

I have a policy that anything that I really care about is backed up. If it’s not backed up, I don’t care about it.

e.g. while I’d be sad if my mythtv box suddenly had a disk failure, I can always put in a blank disk and I don’t loose too much.

My email is fetched onto a server at home, and I use offlineimap to keep an up to date (nearly) copy on my laptop. I also, at least weekly, burn the entire thing to DVD (it still fits, when bzip2 compressed).

Also, for all that other stuff that is pretty important (/home), I do a xfsdump to external disk.

I also now (on a paranoid spending trip at Fry’s) have a small portable drive that is roughly twice the size of my /home partition. The idea is that on the road I can regularly do an xfsdump to this  – in fact, two complete dumps (and one or two incrementals on it).

Call me paranoid, but I like my data.

I also make sure I burn photos to DVD, but that’s more periodic as there’s a lot of them now.

2 thoughts on “Mike Hillyer’s laptop melting and backup fun at UC

  1. Paranoid and you don’t do daily backups??? :-)

    I’ve noticed that very few of my geek peers do regular backups. I guess it seems like a chore to do it comprehensively. I had pretty spotty practices until a few months ago I finally sat down and made myself a system. Now I just have to run one script a day (backing up to external disk), and another each month (backing up to DVD. Right now my home directory fits on one DVD, but if it grows over, my script automatically will span DVDs. Although by then double layer DVDs will probably be affordable). Here’s what I ended up with:

    http://blog.johnjosephbachir.org/233

  2. Well, I effectively have daily backups as:
    – all mail is mirrored in at least two places
    – all source code commits are automatically mailed to public mailing lists.

    so anything I am likely to do during a day (mail and source) are synced several times a day.

    max time between mail check: 12-18hrs
    and code commits go out instantly.

    for other things, like talks i’m working on, i’ll rsync a source repo regularly.

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