Backups

I turned my computer on this morning and to my dismay my 9 month old 1TB harddrive could no longer be detected. It is still under warranty so it’s no big deal about the hardware going bad, however it is a big deal that I didn’t have a backup of anything on the drive. Fortunately it only consisted of replaceable content, however it will take quite some time and bandwidth to regain that content.

This drive failure emphasizes the importance of backing up my unrecoverable data, and I’m curious as to what methods other people use for backup. A few months ago I backed up a good amount of information to Amazon S3, however doing that on a regular basis is not the simplest task, and probably isn’t the best place to store sensitive information unless it’s encrypted. The other thing that’s important to me is synchronization between my desktop and laptop, of which the challenge is my laptop runs OS X and my desktop runs Ubuntu Linux. I currently use rsync to move files back and forth, however it’s not a good solution when I wish to delete or rename files. I also am considering using GIT to store version information which so long as only 1 is considered the master there should be no issues.

Also on a semi-related note, if you want to run make clean on any folder under your current one which contains a makefile for archiving purposes try the following command:

find . -iname Makefile -exec dirname {} \; | while read i; do make clean -C $i; done