the Andrew Bailey

International Backup Awareness Day

Last Thursday (I think), I pushed some new code out here. Among the updates, I made Spruce more flexible, I added an "Expires" header to my static content (css, images), and I've done some more SEO friendly URLs.

Most importantly, I've implemented an auto backup feature. Every night, my site will observe International Backup Awareness Day, and dump its content (articles, comments, images, etc...) to another hard drive. An hour later, another unrelated backup will push it to yet another hard drive.

A few weeks ago, I made a backup script for my desktop to ease the pain of backing up, hunting for what directories to copy. Now I just shovel stuff to where I normally do, and click!

Also important to backing up, is to test your backup, and restore it. If you copy files somewhere, copy them back sometime.

Nothing makes you feel worse than a backup that doesn't work. I heard that one of my friends had "backed up" his documents directory to a networked machine, only to discover the reason that it was so fast was because he had only created a shortcut to his (now cleaned) directory. Some years later, after he had berated me for using Vista earlier that day ("it doesn't work? that's what Vista does"), he said that a virus from his brother's computer had deleted everything on his own. I preceded to berate him for still using XP ("that's what XP does, it deletes your stuff"), while jab pointing at his bro's computer, with a common friend being amused by the show. Names have been omitted to protect the guilty, so don't think I'm talking about you, ****** ** *********** *****.

Posted under Miscellaneous.

You can't complain about this anymore. It's perfect!