Not much blogging recently as I struggle to make my spare time count. Had to rebuild my wife’s Windows machine after the hard drive gave up the ghost. The good news is that my extensive system of redundant backups is working pretty well. The bad news is that I really should have put more energy into testing the restores – when you attempt to restore from your backups you discover all the things that you could have been doing that would have made your life easier.

(Just one example, out of many that I really need to blog about: when your nifty rsync script runs to backup your Ubuntu-based file server, make sure you’re getting the ownership correct on the backup files – it’s not just a matter of setting the right flags for rsync; you have to make sure to run rsync as a user with the correct permissions, like, say, root.  There are many files which will simply break if they’re owned by the wrong user, and you’ll have to choose between reinstalling Linux or painstakingly setting the correct owner for each file on the restored system.  Have I mentioned that you should test the restore procedure? Test the restore procedure!)

I now find myself with an extra hard drive, which I’m going to use for simulating some total system crashes and seeing how quickly I can set myself back up. Or rather, someday I will. Right now I need to get back to writing actual apps. Fortunately, now that I’ve spent time doing all this backup work, plus automating the entire install of my Web server with Capistrano, tweaking the available Rails packages for emacs, and attempting to revitalize my GTD system by sorting through the heaps of old mail in my Inbox, I am itching for action.