4 ms·

On the Mac with Time Machine, I can lose at most an hour of work. Not saying that to praise the Mac; I'm saying that because that's how all computers ought to b

by cjensen 13y ago

On the Mac with Time Machine, I can lose at most an hour of work. Not saying that to praise the Mac; I'm saying that because that's how all computers ought to be. This would be a swell time for Dropbox to offer Linus a free large business account so he can store everything.

primelens 13y ago
I've never used it, but do you mean a Desktop with a permanently attached external drive to backup to? How does that work on a laptop?
- msoad 13y ago
  Apple Time Capsule. Look it up
  - primelens 13y ago
    Ah! But then I'd have another Apple specific gizmo in my life :-). But it looks interesting nevertheless. Thanks.
    - jws 13y ago
      Then you are probably the sort that wants to use rsync and the --link-dest option, which is about the same. (Except for the nice retrieval interface.) You can make a new backup and it will only consume space and copy bandwidth for the files which have changed. It is cheap to keep N backups for large N.
    - pfranz 13y ago
      I have a raspberry pi running http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/ http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/ However, it seems to get in a corrupted if I close my laptop lid mid-backup. I don't lose anything, I just need to run disk util on the backup image. Prior to that I was using time machine on USB and never had an issue. If you work plugged in you'll never lose more than 5-10min of work. It'll remind you every 7 days you haven't backed up. I was looking into a solution for Linux the other week and http://www.rsnapshot.org/ http://www.rsnapshot.org/ works very similarly and is what fits my needs there. The benefit of time machine is that excludes unnecessary OS folders/files by default and the OS installer has a simple interface for recovering the whole hdd from a time machine backup. I recently found time machien now has tmutil, a commandline tool for accessing time machine backups which really helps make managing them more transparent.
quarterto 13y ago
Yeah, Dropbox doesn't play so well with Git...
- cjensen 13y ago
  If you use Git on just one Dropbox instance at a time, I assume it works just fine. "One instance at a time" is no different than anything else you do with Dropbox. I meant to suggest Dropbox Business as a continuous backup solution, not as sync.
  - phpnode 13y ago
    problem is as soon as you checkout a branch, dropbox sees a load of different files and tries to sync them. Then you switch back to another branch and dropbox tries to sync again. Do it often enough and your machine grinds to a halt
    - krallja 13y ago
      Use dropbox as a remote (bare) repo, not a working directory
cliveowen 13y ago
First thing I thought, Linus should evaluate a MacBook. If I remember correctly he once stated that the MacBook Air was the perfect machine for him, so it's not that far-fetched.
- cjensen 13y ago
  Running MacOS isn't very helpful when you are trying to develop Linux.
claudius 13y ago
I ha(ve/d) a small external hard drive enclosure which holds/held two 2 TB drives in RAID-1 mode (recently tested that it’s indeed RAID 1: The enclosure left out smoke and one of the drives now works happily in a single-drive enclosure), attache(s/d) via eSATA and is used every hour by an rsync backup run using hard links. Every evening, I run another script that cleans up most of the older backups of the last week, keeping one per day. So, yes, while at home, I also lose at most one hour of stuff, provided that nothing catastrophic happens that damages both the drive and the notebook – unfortunately until very recently, the internet connection to backup offsite was simply not there, and even with 50/10 MBit/s it will be annoying.
- ansible 13y ago
  If you hadn't written your own script, I'd recommend you use rsnapshot [1] instead. It is based on rsync. You can set up a schedule with multiple generations. [1] http://www.rsnapshot.org http://www.rsnapshot.org
  - claudius 13y ago
    Yeah, I stumbled over it less than a week after I had set up some nice script to delete the extraneous backups I didn’t need. At the time, my requirements for keeping backups were a little stricter, too, due to space constraints, which were not easily implementable using rsnapshot. I guess with my ‘new’ scheme of one backup/day to keep, it’d be much easier.

by cjensen 13y ago

primelens 13y ago

I've never used it, but do you mean a Desktop with a permanently attached external drive to backup to? How does that work on a laptop?

msoad 13y ago
Apple Time Capsule. Look it up
- primelens 13y ago
  Ah! But then I'd have another Apple specific gizmo in my life :-). But it looks interesting nevertheless. Thanks.
  - jws 13y ago
    Then you are probably the sort that wants to use rsync and the --link-dest option, which is about the same. (Except for the nice retrieval interface.) You can make a new backup and it will only consume space and copy bandwidth for the files which have changed. It is cheap to keep N backups for large N.
  - pfranz 13y ago
    I have a raspberry pi running http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/ http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/ However, it seems to get in a corrupted if I close my laptop lid mid-backup. I don't lose anything, I just need to run disk util on the backup image. Prior to that I was using time machine on USB and never had an issue. If you work plugged in you'll never lose more than 5-10min of work. It'll remind you every 7 days you haven't backed up. I was looking into a solution for Linux the other week and http://www.rsnapshot.org/ http://www.rsnapshot.org/ works very similarly and is what fits my needs there. The benefit of time machine is that excludes unnecessary OS folders/files by default and the OS installer has a simple interface for recovering the whole hdd from a time machine backup. I recently found time machien now has tmutil, a commandline tool for accessing time machine backups which really helps make managing them more transparent.

quarterto 13y ago

Yeah, Dropbox doesn't play so well with Git...

cjensen 13y ago
If you use Git on just one Dropbox instance at a time, I assume it works just fine. "One instance at a time" is no different than anything else you do with Dropbox. I meant to suggest Dropbox Business as a continuous backup solution, not as sync.
- phpnode 13y ago
  problem is as soon as you checkout a branch, dropbox sees a load of different files and tries to sync them. Then you switch back to another branch and dropbox tries to sync again. Do it often enough and your machine grinds to a halt
  - krallja 13y ago
    Use dropbox as a remote (bare) repo, not a working directory

cliveowen 13y ago

First thing I thought, Linus should evaluate a MacBook. If I remember correctly he once stated that the MacBook Air was the perfect machine for him, so it's not that far-fetched.

cjensen 13y ago
Running MacOS isn't very helpful when you are trying to develop Linux.

claudius 13y ago

I ha(ve/d) a small external hard drive enclosure which holds/held two 2 TB drives in RAID-1 mode (recently tested that it’s indeed RAID 1: The enclosure left out smoke and one of the drives now works happily in a single-drive enclosure), attache(s/d) via eSATA and is used every hour by an rsync backup run using hard links. Every evening, I run another script that cleans up most of the older backups of the last week, keeping one per day. So, yes, while at home, I also lose at most one hour of stuff, provided that nothing catastrophic happens that damages both the drive and the notebook – unfortunately until very recently, the internet connection to backup offsite was simply not there, and even with 50/10 MBit/s it will be annoying.

ansible 13y ago
If you hadn't written your own script, I'd recommend you use rsnapshot [1] instead. It is based on rsync. You can set up a schedule with multiple generations. [1] http://www.rsnapshot.org http://www.rsnapshot.org
- claudius 13y ago
  Yeah, I stumbled over it less than a week after I had set up some nice script to delete the extraneous backups I didn’t need. At the time, my requirements for keeping backups were a little stricter, too, due to space constraints, which were not easily implementable using rsnapshot. I guess with my ‘new’ scheme of one backup/day to keep, it’d be much easier.