# Friendly Reminder (OT) **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [April 22, 2006, 11:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/friendly-reminder-ot/58546 "2006-04-22T23:40:13Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Hampton](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/8edcca/32.png) [@Hampton](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Hampton)\ **Post date:** [April 22, 2006, 11:40pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/friendly-reminder-ot/58546/1 "2006-04-22T23:40:13Z")
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. ---
**Author:** ![Hampton](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/8edcca/32.png) [@Hampton](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Hampton)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 2:04am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/friendly-reminder-ot/58546/2 "2006-04-24T02:04:47Z")
_hides face in shame at having entire program on one laptop_ ---
**Author:** ![Hampton](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/8edcca/32.png) [@Hampton](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Hampton)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 2:13am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/friendly-reminder-ot/58546/3 "2006-04-24T02:13:51Z")
I keep one on a webserver, one on my computer, and one on a thumbdrive 🙂 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. ---
**Author:** ![Hampton](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/8edcca/32.png) [@Hampton](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Hampton)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 4:46am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/friendly-reminder-ot/58546/4 "2006-04-24T04:46:44Z")
Another reason why you should update to SVN everyday 😉 (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 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Hampton](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/8edcca/32.png) [@Hampton](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Hampton)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 7:21am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/friendly-reminder-ot/58546/5 "2006-04-24T07:21:55Z")
Dan S. \ 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 🙂 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 ---
**Author:** ![Hampton](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/8edcca/32.png) [@Hampton](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Hampton)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 7:43am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/friendly-reminder-ot/58546/6 "2006-04-24T07:43:22Z")
Yep, got it in hand 🙂 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 ---
**Author:** ![Hampton](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/h/8edcca/32.png) [@Hampton](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/Hampton)\ **Post date:** [April 24, 2006, 5:53am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/friendly-reminder-ot/58546/7 "2006-04-24T05:53:42Z")
> /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 🙂 > 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/](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](http://www.dansketcher.com)