Re: [9fans] sad commentary

[Eris Discordia <eris.discordia@gmail.com>]

A very effective "backup" method for work on your "desktop:"

1. Organize your "creative work" when you "create" them, plan beforehand

2. Copy/synchronize the collection to an external hard disk and/or a
solid-state storage device which you detach from your "desktop" computer
after you turn it off, repeat this step depending on how heavily you modify
the work, automate using cron (or Task Scheduler if you're on Windows)

3. Copy the entire collection to optical media every once in a while, store
the copy in a safe place

Pros: safer than you'd expect, no additional learning curve, cheap,
platform independent
Cons: takes a little more "backup awareness"

Notes:

a. This does not apply to your work in a highly networked
corporate/university environment. In those places backup practice should be
determined by systems administrators and/or pertaining policies, which are
of course none of your business unless you're the admin.

b. If your data happens to be quite a lot of source code it should be
stored in a version control system which may provide its own backup
measures. The version of SourceSafe that came with Visual Studio 6.0
Enterprise Edition did that back many years ago. With (now almost obsolete)
RCS backing up should be as simple as tarring one or more directories. CVS
and/or SVN shouldn't pose any harder problems.

c. Most real-world "user generated" data doesn't need the fine grained
"restoration" options envisioned in Fossil/Venti. Few people ever need
every single copy Fossil/Venti has to offer of the novel they're writing or
the Maple worksheet they're editting.

Best wishes,
Eris Discordia

--On Monday, June 30, 2008 3:11 PM -0500 michael block
<michaelmuffin@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 2:12 PM, Eris Discordia
> <eris.discordia@gmail.com> wrote:
>> Fossil/Venti, however brilliant it may look like to the code junkie, does
>> not offer anything for me but added complexity.
>
> i'm using p9p venti on linux, and it's been a total breeze to
> configure and administer. the utility of hist and yesterday in my
> opinion far outweigh the couple megabytes of memory that venti needs
> to be running all the time (i run it on my desktop machine, not a
> dedicated file server). i'm curious to know what backup system you're
> using that is simpler than venti. my interest in plan 9, inferno,
> octopus, &c stems mainly from my using venti for backups and finding
> it to be far better that anything unix had to offer. so it you really
> do have a backup system simpler and more robust than venti, i'd love
> to try it out
>
> --
> i apologize in advance if gmail has in anyway mutilated this messege.
> stay beautiful!
>