Archive for October, 2007
Home Backup Project - Part 6: Summary
Throughout this project, I’ve had to shed pieces of the plan off as I realized that they:
were too expensive
were too time consuming
had low WAF
I stumbled upon a 500Gb drive for under $90 on TigerDirect, which allowed me to keep data off-site in a high-security location for relatively little effort. That was luck.. keeping it up [...]
Home Backup Project - Part 5: Evaluating Incremental Backup Options
The most crucial piece of this project is keeping the primary family computer, a 20″ iMac, backed up. This project might as well never have happened if this one task were incomplete. I evaluated several options for keeping the machine backed-up:
mozy.com
JungleDisk and other Amazon S3 utilities
rdiff-backup
Time Machine
Instantbird
Recently released, Instantbird is a cross-platform, multi-protocol Instant Messaging client, built on Mozilla’s XUL framework, implementing Pidgin’s libpurple for connectivity. This is version 0.1, and already it’s off to a good start, supporting all of the libpurple clients out of the box.
There are some very obvious awesome things about this development effort:
By using open-source, community-driven [...]
Home Backup Project - Part 4: Creating ISO images
As part of the ongoing home backup project, I’ve tasked myself with converting all of my installation media to disk images (.iso files) so as to allow me to recover said media in the event that, say, my house blew up.
Worst case scenario, I think.
Anyway, I thought this would be really easy on my mac:
dd [...]
Home Backup Project - Part 3: Subversion Clients
As part of the ongoing home backup project, I’ve been testing various SVN clients to make sure I have a good working application for both home and work environments. At work I run WinXP Pro and therefore use TortoiseSVN because, well, it’s pretty much the best there is. I love the shell integration - it’s [...]
Home Backup Project - Part 2: Plan!
The next step in this project was to visualize the future case - where should my data reside in working form and in archive form. Then, I had to figure out what’s feasible now and what’s feasible down the line. I can’t just go out and buy a 4 TB NAS, though that thought has [...]
Home Backup Project - Part 1: Identify the Problem
This is the first post in a series about how I have implemented what I hope is a solid data backup strategy for myself. I may be completely off of my rocker, but I feel a lot more secure about where my data are, and to a geek, this is important!
A couple of months ago, [...]
In which I pontificate about the importance of backups
In the past six months or so, a few events have made me realize that my home backup strategy plain stinks!
First, the fire alarm at my house went off… exactly once. It was a horrifically loud squelch, and I sprung out of bed and raced around the house to find the source of the alarm [...]
The Best of Intentions
Also known as the “post that tells everyone why you’re here and is almost like a disclaimer without being legally binding.”
This site has, for about a year, been nothing more than a page telling the internets about one of the several Matt Shelton’s out there. (I am not a Wide Receiver for the Patriots, for [...]
Hello world!
Reaching out and touching the ether…
It burns!







