Backing Up with rsync, iCal, and Applescript

This morning marks the completion of the first full backup I’ve done in quite a while. But not the last. For the past 3 months, I’ve been working on an automated backup system – so I no longer need to wonder if things are backed up. They are. In at least two places.

A little background:

  • I only have Macs in my house. One of them…the Mini, acts as a server
  • I’ve got a StrongSpace account. Not that this makes much of a difference, any accessible volume could work the same (I’m intrigued how S3 might work into the mix as well).

The backup system is tiered;

  1. Every couple of days, the “client” Macs, the ones that get used everyday, backup to the Mini with
    rsync -aE --exclude='.*' /usr/bin/ssh /[path to source folder (see below)]/ [username]@[url of local server]:/[path to your backup directory]/

    I’ve got these all wrapped up in a single backup.sh file, with a line for:

    ~/Library/Application Support
    ~/Library/Mail
    ~/Library/Keychains
    ~/Library/Documents/Projects
    ~/Library/Documents/Palm
    ~/Pictures
    ~/Desktop

  2. Then, the Mini backs up the client folders to StrongSpace.
    rsync -rltvz --exclude='.*' /usr/bin/ssh /[path to client backup folder]/ [username]@[url of online server]:/[path to your online backup directory]/
  3. I’m using SSH Keys (the /usr/bin/ssh in the strings above) to automate the login (see MagpieBrain for instructions on setting this up).
  4. On all the machines, the backup.sh file is wrapped in an Applescript
    do shell script "/Users/garrickvanburen/Documents/Projects/RSYNC/garrick_backup.sh"
  5. The Applescript is called from an alarm in iCal, like this

What’s your backup strategy?

ELSEWHERE:
David Roessli takes a different approach.

Mistaking Relevance for Trivia

Last night, I had bad dream about attending a live recording of a radio program.

From what I can remember, the point of the show was to dismiss highly-personal communications as trivial while a panel of teen girls shared the melodramatic relationship unfolding within their MySpace pages.

While “trivia” (or gossip) might not be the most noble of messages to share, the vast majority of our gestures are just that. In Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language – Robin Dunbar posits that we talk for gossip. Gossip being as much about relationship as primates grooming each other.

I suspect gossip comes right after spam in volume of daily email. I don’t think this is bad – especially with good filters. Filters we don’t really have yet, filters that consider anything not relevant to me now as spam (“news”, “gossip”, “trivia”, and otherwise).

Not having those filter yet is mostly OK – because we don’t yet have the quantity of publishers that demand it. Tomorrow – when news/gossip/trivia is published block-by-block – we will.

ELSEWHERE:
“Truth #2: What viewers/readers deem important is often far different than what we judge important.” – Terry Heaton

Garrick is at MPR’s The Loop Tonight

I’ll be in the audience of tonight’s recording of MPR’s The Loop: Digital Divisions.

Hopefully I’ll see some you there as well.

My notes and thoughts from the event:

  1. All the chairs are filled. A good cross-section of Minnesotans. Far more diverse in age, background, and ethnicity than the last time I was here at MPR HQ.
  2. They made fun of the usual suspects – without any sense that the iPod is the same as the Walkman and the transistor radio before it, that text messages have a lot in common with telegrams, and that being transported to another world in books is somehow not exactly the same as Second Life.
  3. There were 100 people in the room. Maybe 10 were on mic for the 90 minutes we were there. Like the elderly gentleman next to me, I too, expected more of a discussion, less of a performance. It would have been more interesting to actually have a discussion.
  4. Blah. Feels like an opportunity squandered.

ELSEWHERE:
Jesse Ross feels differently.

Huge thanks go out to Jeff Horwich (Host of In the Loop) for stopping by and leaving an excellent comment. I think there are some fairly simple ways to dramatically minimize the risks he identifies, while increasing the value of people attending the program. I’m reminded of Unconferences and the notion that:

“The sum of the expertise of the people in the audience is greater than the sum of expertise of the people on stage.”

Some Post-Pre-Dad Thoughts

Daddy Types is collecting thoughts for Soon-to-Be-Dads.

Mine:
Everyday, take your family for a walk.

And a bonus story:
One of our neighbors rang the doorbell one night back when Little C was just a few months old. Jen and I were watching TV and I was giving Little C his early evening bottle.

The neighbor asked if I could help him unload a new swingset from his car.

The he noticed what I was doing and said: “No rush. Enjoy this time. It doesn’t last that long.”

The News Block by Block

“The future of media is to stop boring us with news that doesn’t relate to our lives. I’ll start reading my ‘local’ newspaper again when it covers my block.” – Chris Anderson

Chris nails the idea I’ve talked about on this blog (1, 2, 3) and in numerous lunches: the blog-on-every-corner news.

St. Anthony Village is a pretty small town geographically, 3 square miles. Imagine if just the houses on the corners published something community-related every other day. That’s 1/3 of your neighbors writing about what’s happening on their block – regularly. More frequently than any of the papers – all without an ‘Associated Press’ byline.

Sure, the same topics will be covered…but the importance (relevance + intimacy + community) will be so much greater. Plus, far greater comprehensiveness on any given subject whether High School Ice Hockey or City Council proceedings. Overlap verifies.

Later 11 Apr 2007
I just picked up blogbyblock.com.

Balance in the Air

A couple very recent quotes on balancing your life from two of my favorite bloggers:

“5. People have only so much toleration for novelty in them; no one embraces novelty consistently and in all fields of life. Spend your tolerance for novelty wisely.” – Tyler Cowen

23.”Running a startup is full of extreme ups and downs. Which is why so many successful and happy entrepreneurs I know lead such normal, stable, unglamorous, “boring”, family-centered lives. Somehow they need the latter in order to balance out the former.” – Hugh MacLeod

RSS: Rude Screen Scrapers?

“I hate it when RSS scrapers steal my content” – Thord Daniel Hedengren

Yes – crediting the source is polite. I make a point of linking back and crediting, and expect the same those of you that find what I write interesting. That said, spammers are inherently rude. They don’t change their ways when asked politely.

If a publisher doesn’t want their publication re-published (w/ or w/o credit – the come together) then they shouldn’t be using RSS.

Or the internet.

Or anything that can be digitized and uploaded.

Or the publisher could put a block on any site they don’t want accessing their site, something in the .htaccess usually works pretty well.

Fun for the Comments: Re-state the quote above without using the blacklisted buzzwords.

Something’s Burning

My 2 most recent pet peeves:

  1. Permalinks that are actually Feedburner redirects.
  2. Feed links that are actually Feedburner landing pages

Anyone else or just me?

LATER:
Some elaboration as requested by Jake Parrillo from the Publisher Services Team:

Jake,

Thanks for the note.

To start, I use NetNewsWire as my aggregator.

By redirects, I mean the tag of an item being a Feedburner link redirecting to, rather than being, the item’s permalink. When I’m quoting and linking to the item, I want the actual permalink. Today, to get it, I need to load the Feedburner link into a browser and wait for the redirect, then grab the permalink. Artificially inflating pageviews and generally slowing me down.

Yes, by ‘landing page’, I was referring to the “Browser Friendly” pages. When I clicked the feed link, I expected the feed url to be passed to NetNewsWire. With the “Browser Friendly” pages; I need to first realize that I need to take an action, then make a selection, then the url gets added to NNW. Again, slowing me down and not what I expect to occur.