brentashley

Michael O’Connor Clarke’s recent brush with near-data-death had a happy ending, and he credits my backup advice with helping to save the day. I figure now is as good a time as any to make that advice more widely known.

The ONLY successful backup strategy is one that actually gets your system backed up regularly. This means taking it out of the hands of the procrastinator and into the hands of the automator.

In my opinion the only truly workable restore strategy is to have a disk image to restore. If you have to spend untold hours loading your OS and programs, searching for license keys and farting around with settings, passwords, adding users etc etc, just to get to the point where you can restore your backed-up data, you are wasting time and money.

A regularly scheduled disk-image backup will save your otherwise very sorry ass many many times.

I use Acronis True Image to back up my laptop. The Home version suits my needs, but the Workstation and Server products are stellar as well for a business environment.

Acronis makes a compressed image of selected partitions on your hard drive. It does this in the background while you are still using your computer. You can schedule it to happen regularly so you don’t even have to think about it.

With Acronis you can:

• Make a full image of your drive
  • Make multiple incremental images against a full image
  • Save the image locally or over the network, split to multiple files or CDs/DVDs
• Access the images for read or restore
  • Mount any full or incremental image to access a snapshot of your drive via a drive letter
  • Restore your machine from any full or incremental state via disk, cd, network
  • Restore your machine from bare metal with a rescue boot CD
• Schedule backups
  • Automate backups so you don’t have to think about them
  • Define pre and post commands to run

Those are the basics you need. Beyond that you can use the rescue CD to back up and restore non-windows partitions, too – Linux and BSD for instance. There are many other features too.

I have a scheduled task set up to back up my laptop every Monday and Thursday at 2am to my home server. If my laptop is plugged into my network at home at those times, it will save a full disk image to the server. If the target directory already contains a full image, it will build an incremental image.

At the start of each month, I delete the contents of my LastMonth directory and move the current image and incrementals there. I should really write a batch to invoke pre-task to do this automatically, since this is the only thing I still have to remember to do.

I’m pretty serious about my backups. On my server, I have two 250Gb hard drives that I synchronize daily using rsync. I also copy certain critical files off to a NAS device that’s at the other end of the house and take sporadic file backups to a USB drive to take offsite. You don’t have to get that crazy about it, but for the sake of your long-term sanity, by all means set up a regular image backup of your main machines.

If you haven’t yet sat up and taken notice of the Net Neutrality issue, now is the time to start.

Here are some essential posts to bring you up to speed:

• Jevon McDonald – An Email To My Friends
• Martin Cleaver – Your ISP Wants to Double-Charge You
• Will Pate – 3 Ways to Support Net Neutrality in Canada
• Amber Mac – The Net Neutrality Debate in Canada

Recently my friend and business associate Noel was tired of meeting people that day who were content to rest on their laurels but had no vision or drive to do new things. His frustrated cry was:

Don’t tell me what you did yesterday!

I modified his mantra and we both liked the result:

Don’t tell me what you did yesterday unless it was at least two days ahead of its time!

There have been some mentions and bit of buzz about my Secure Ajax Mashups article at IBM:

• Ajaxian
• ifacethoughts
• Dave Johnson
• Joe Walker (DWR)
• Shelley at Burningbird

On an entirely different topic, I’ll be playing the drums tonight at Zemra‘s regular wednesday night jam session hosted by Brian Allossery. The meaty stuff starts at about 11 p.m. and I’ll be taking the odd turn until about 12:30 a.m. if you care to drop by. It’s an open mic thing, so if you sing or play, put your name on the list at the bar and let’s jam!

IBM Developerworks has just published my new article “Shaping the Future of Ajax Mashups”, wherein I explain that browsers are still not well equipped to enable mashups that integrate input from multiple sources without falling prey to serious security and/or scaling issues. I then discuss some of the potential solutions to the problem and call for the development community to get involved.

I’m also interviewed by IBM’s Scott Laningham in a short podcast promoting the article.

One good way to get involved is to mix with the top people in the Ajax world – the browser manufacturers, the folks who create the libraries and APIs we use to build our Ajax apps, the big players in the industry. Ben and Dion at Ajaxian have just made a call for speakers for their Ajax Experience 2007 show slated for July 25-27 in San Francisco. Having established some great contacts and communication at the two previous Ajaxian shows, I can tell you without doubt that this is the one Ajax show of the year not to miss. It’s an opportunity to spend a couple of days rubbing shoulders with the people in the industry who can actually influence the future of the tools we use to build and use the interactive net.

Dave Johnson has posted a sample chapter from the upcoming book called Enterprise Ajax, written by Dave and his Nitobi colleagues Alexei White and Andre Charland.

I did the tech review on this book and I can tell you it’s filled with high quality writing and insight taken from some pretty serious experience – Andre and Dave started up EBusinessApps (which became Nitobi last year) at least 5 years ago doing Ajaxy stuff well before it was de rigeur.

The book should come out in early summer – you can pre-order a copy now.

In the post-demo schmooze at Toronto DemoCamp 12 last week, I was discussing Ajax-y things with a few people and I found myself articulating a notion that has been rolling around in my head unformed for a while – that of Javascript as Babelfish.

If you look some of the popular Javascript libraries and frameworks, an important aspect of their design is to make one’s Javascript code feel more like another environment that better suits the application or in which the designer (and ultimately user) is fluent.

• prototype => Ruby
• mochikit => Python
• JQuery => XPath
• GWT => Java

To be precise, GWT is actually written in Java, so it doesn’t fit exactly but continues to demonstrate the trend of people wanting to stay in the environment they understand but have Javascript do the work.

Javascript is remarkable in its flexibility of expression that allows you to apply it to various idiomatic styles. I can’t think of another language that would be quite so accomodating.

Is this trend indicative of Javascript’s power, or the ingenuity of developers who are stuck with using Javascript in the browser when it differs from their environment of choice?

Via Simon Willison, I see that Dave Winer demonstrates how remarkably far out of touch he is with the state of internet programming.

JSON has been promoted for a couple of years now, and has been visibly gaining traction among the net programming community for at least 18 months. It’s quite telling that it has only recently filtered through Dave’s navel-focused gaze.

And before any analysis, he’s quick to dismiss and belittle it:

God bless the re-inventers

Gotta love em, because there’s no way they’re going to stop breaking what works, and fixing what don’t need no fixing.

…and to show us the particular shade of his sunglasses:

I figured, sheez it can’t be that hard to parse, so let’s see what it looks like, and damn, IT’S NOT EVEN XML!

As Dr Phil asks — What were they thinking?

Sheez, Dave, maybe they were thinking “I don’t care to use XML” – those presumptuous philistines. Let the XML infidels be slaughtered:

Who did this travesty? Let’s find a tree and string them up. Now.

Chief infidel Douglas Crockford’s comment is worth framing:

I liked the part where Dr Phil said “What were they thinking?” I asked the same question when I first saw XML being proposed as a data format. There were obviously better alternatives.

The good thing about reinventing the wheel is that you can get a round one.

Dave leaves the best line for last:

Silicon Valley is made up of little boys pulling their puds, constantly making love to each other, pretending the world revolves around them.

…the all-too-easy inference of course being that it actually revolves around Dave Winer, chief pud-puller, making love only to himself.