Friendly Reminder (OT)

Today, I had a tragic hard drive crash. I hadn’t updated anything to SVN
in
two weeks.

I’m posting this here as a reminder to my beloved Rails community.

Everyone, right now… make a backup of your rails work. Make sure its
on
two disks. Many of you already do that automatically, but just make sure
its
working.

Two near-release rails plugins were lost in the tragic crash along with
the
two weeks of work on several other projects.

Remember, it could happen to you.

So, backup! Right now! I’m serious!

This public service announcement is brought to you by… the letter
S…
for Stubborn

-hampton.

hides face in shame at having entire program on one laptop

I keep one on a webserver, one on my computer, and one on a thumbdrive
:slight_smile:

Sorry for your loss, any way you can get it back? Maybe you can boot
into
linux and mount the drive and see what you can get.

Another reason why you should update to SVN everyday :wink: (a temporary
branch of course…)

/start of paranoia
After that … make sure your SVN is running on a server tat at least
have raid 5 and at the end of everyday make 2 tape copies of the svn
repository. One to hide in the mountains in case an
earthquake/flood/tsunami happens and the other in the office…
Do a complete differential backup of the entire server once a week too!
/end

Nah… SVN and thumbdrive works fine :wink:

Dan S. <dansketcher@…> writes:

Which is why I got a Dreamhost account. $120/year, SSH, 20Gig, and
lots of space to host my friend’s domains and mail. I still keep my
SVN repos on my dev server in my office, but at 3am every night they
get synced. The FSFS backend for SVN can be backed up this way
according to the docs so long as no-one is committing at the time (or
risk inconsistencies that require manual resolution), but I figure if
I’m awake and coding at 3am I should probably check what I’m writing
in the morning before I commit :slight_smile:

Now, you know, Dreamhost is a shared space, so any old fool
could be futzing with your stuff there. If you’re going to go that
route,
I’d advise looking into Duplicity which gpg encrypts your stuff before
it
copies your files there.

-g

Yep, got it in hand :slight_smile: You gave me a bit of that sinking feeling
though… but fortunately I did have a bit of foresight on that one.

Thanks for the tip on Duplicity though, it looks spiffy!

Cheers,
Dan

/start of paranoia
After that … make sure your SVN is running on a server tat at least
have raid 5 and at the end of everyday make 2 tape copies of the svn
repository. One to hide in the mountains in case an
earthquake/flood/tsunami happens and the other in the office…
Do a complete differential backup of the entire server once a week too!
/end

Once I started getting paranoid I got really interested in things like
strongspace - but then I realised all you need in order to do nightly
rsync backups from your dev box is a lot of space on a remote machine
that has SSH access.

Which is why I got a Dreamhost account. $120/year, SSH, 20Gig, and
lots of space to host my friend’s domains and mail. I still keep my
SVN repos on my dev server in my office, but at 3am every night they
get synced. The FSFS backend for SVN can be backed up this way
according to the docs so long as no-one is committing at the time (or
risk inconsistencies that require manual resolution), but I figure if
I’m awake and coding at 3am I should probably check what I’m writing
in the morning before I commit :slight_smile:

From there, it’s easy enough to extend that to Home dirs, work dirs,
/etc, photos, and almost anything that you want to have >1 copy of.
Put it in your crontab and it’s 0 maintenance nightlies of all your
kit. Even from windows:
http://www.antidis.com/articles/2005/08/windows-rsync/

Course… not that this helps Hampton…

(disclaimer: I’m not in any way related to or have any relationship
with dreamhost apart from being a customer.)


Dan S.
www.peoplehub.com.au
www.dansketcher.com