Link of the day: How to backup Facebook

I tried the ArchiveFB Firefox extension and it seems to work pretty well. Yay, a way to backup Facebook! Just follow this guide.

Lifehack tip: Save install files and information

For last few years, I've been saving all my install files on an external hard drive. Doing this has really helped me whenever I have to re-install my operating system. I've had to re-install Windows XP twice, not counting the time that the Lenovo repair depot needlessly wiped my laptop back to factory state.

Starting over from scratch, it's handy to have all my install files on-hand without having to download them again or even remember what I had on my computer [1]. More importantly, if you buy software that's only available online, you can only download it once. If your computer crashes and you have to re-install your operating system, that is not a "valid excuse" for getting another copy of the software. Believe me, I tried.

If the install files require license codes, make sure you save those, too. And don't forget to backup the install files!

[1] Alternatively, you could run Belarc Advisor on your Windows machine to get a list of all installed programs on your computer. Belarc Advisor is also handy for getting hardware model/ID numbers.

Link of the day: The Tao of Backup

This is a truly funny and clever way to explain why backups are important and how to backup properly.

My backup/maintenance solution

I think I've finally figured out a good plan to maintain my computer and digital information.

1. Compressed backup of home computer at beginning of month onto a portable external hard drive (Seagate 100 GB notebook drive). Rotate several backup copies on the drive, deleting the oldest copy before writing a new copy. Bring drive home to do backup, then take drive off-site to another location away from home.
   
2. Compressed backup of home computer mid-month on a large-capacity external hard drive at home. Rotate several backup copies on the drive, deleting the oldest copy before writing a new copy. I currently have a rather small external hard drive and I'm thinking of replacing it with a Western Digital 500 GB My Book.
   
3. Once a week: run anti-virus and spyware programs and use rsync to a) backup/update work folders on a work server, b) backup/update pine mbox files from my university email account onto my home computer, and c) backup/update an uncompressed mirror of my home computer on the large-capacity external hard drive. I use ssh encryption when connecting to remote computers. The anti-virus/spyware check is a set of automated tasks (I just leave the computer on). The rsync process is handled by running a Windows batch file which calls a Cygwin shell script. Unfortunately, I can't automate this process because rsync needs my password to connect to remote servers; I'd rather not use SSH keys for hands-off password-less login.
   
4. Every two weeks, backup Gmail via POP access to Thunderbird and also backup information on del.icio.us, Backpack, and Yahoo Calendar.
   
5. Once a month, run ccleaner, chkdsk, and O&O defrag. I run chkdsk with a Windows batch file and manually run ccleaner and defrag (I like to do it by hand since they are sensitive tasks).
   

Tech: Subversion, WinSCP, and DVD backup

I wanted to share some software knowledge I've gained recently.

First, I learned how to use Subversion. It is a really nice piece of software, open source, multi-platform and supposedly better than CVS. On Windows, I use the GUI client Tortoise SVN which emulates subversion commands in the explorer window.

Second, I can finally do file synchronization (at least between a local Windows machine and a remote machine). The SFTP client, WinSCP, has synchronization built-in. It's pretty self-explanatory and there is the nice option for previewing the synchronization and tweaking it before it occurs.

I also learned how to DVD backup (note: I am backing up DVDs I own, not copying DVDs and distributing them) by reading this concise tutorial. You can make a backup DVD of your original or even save the original .iso file on your hard drive. The only tricky issues are 1) (possibly) needing to break DVD encryption and 2) (possibly) needing to compress the image of the original so it can fit on a DVD-R. Note the last problem might be solved if you use a higher capacity disc like HD-DVD/Blu-Ray and/or dual-layer.

Paranoia and CD rot

I was talking with a friend at lunch and he claimed that his entire CD collection had been obliterated by the Australian humidity. I searched Google and sure enough there is a phenomenon known as "CD rot." (Also, see a short Wikipedia article.) Apparently, some of the CDs manufactured in the 1980s were defective and extremely susceptible to rot. Present-day CDs are better now, but there is no hard evidence that they last a human lifetime (50-100 years). The best advice I've read is to rip all your CDs to lossless, open-source (and most importantly DRM-less) FLAC format. You could rip to mp3, but what would be the point of paying CD price and saving it to your hard drive in a lossy form? The makers of dbPowerAMP estimates that a 3 minute song takes up 30 MB in FLAC format.

Backing up your blog

As a followup to my previous post, I found an excellent resource about how you can backup your blog.

Backing up data

I'm always paranoid about my computer's data. I have music, photos, documents, research, etc. on my hard drive.

That got me thinking... what are some good ways to backup your data? The most obvious way is to use removable media like CD-ROMS, tapes, DVDs, etc. But it's not very efficient given that we have enormous hard drives to backup nowadays. If you want to go this way, it's preferable to get an external hard drive and backup onto that. The fancy way to do this is to use a RAID array. I don't know much about it, just that it's the professional method of hard drive backup.

What if you're really paranoid? For instance, if your home catches on fire, the fact that you backed up your files on your external hard drive isn't going to do much good, if your external hard drive is sitting next to your home computer. One way is to backup onto a remote server. LiveVault provides this kind of service commercially. Personally, a more economical and practical way is to just back up onto a mobile hard drive and bring it somewhere else (like your office). Maybe the new LaCie rugged hard drive would be ideal.