John Selkirk - GIS Development » Backups

Uninterruptible Power Supply

John Selkirk — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 14:02:13 +0000

So I wake up this morning hoping to finish up development on a piece of work that I am doing to find that my day will be longer than expected. I try to spin up a Virtual PC (VPC) of the ArcGIS 9.1 development environment I have and Virtual PC tells me it cannot find it!

That would usually be OK. I have a clean VPC image of ArcGIS 9.1 and dev environment so normally I would just synchronize the source code and I am off and running. Not today.

I have been working on this new functionality for about 4 days now and have not bothered to add it to source control as it is not ‘ready’. So if I do not try and solve the problem I will lose out of 4 days of blood, sweat and most definitely tears.

It turns out that the storms that have been causing the amazing sound and light shows around here with the occasional power fluctuation were not liked by my external hard disk that is home to all of my VPCs

I have had this trouble before and I was determined to go straight to BestBuy that morning and get a UPC. I didn’t and it was just a matter of time before it happened again I guess. The last time I had to spend about 4 hours persuading the hard disk it was OK and let me access the files so when it happened this morning I sighed, brewed some coffee and got ready for the fight.

It turns out that good ol’ chkdsk saved the day and I am back in. All the files *seem* file but time will tell I guess.

I am going to buy a UPS this time. Honest.

S3 Backup – Part II

John Selkirk — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 16:05:17 +0000

Ok. So I have been uploading my music to S3 for the past 3 days and it has eventually all loaded up there. I have not quite figured out why it does not use all of the bandwidth available but since I actually wanted to do some work this week it was not bad thing!S3 Backup is really nice. The wireless network flaked out on me a few times and I had to restart the backup. Thankfully S3 backup does an inventory of what is on the local machine and compares it to a continually updated DB on the S3 side. This means that you can restart backups from the point you list connectivity which is REALLY useful.My Music is around 7.5 GB which means that to get it into S3 cost me $0.97. Doing the math on the ongoing costs with the 7.5 GB it will cost me a whopping 80 cents a month to have it backed up. You just cannot beat that.Next on the list is 15GB of pictures and then 30GB of home video so I am guessing that the ongoing monthly cost to backup our family data will be less than $5. Well worth the money.The only thing that I would change is the speed of upload. I have not had time to figure out if it is S3 backup, S3 itself or simply just the upload speed that I have but I will!Thanks to Amazon and the guys at S3 backup for the good products/services. Having lost vital information in the past this is really a good thing for me…and I bet others.

Amazon S3 and backups

John Selkirk — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 13:34:08 +0000

The fact that we have no backup system at home has been bugging me for a long time now. I have been waiting for a decent NAS to be available that has RAID or something similar in it. Seeing a webcast about Drobo started me thinking about this again.

I have came to the conclusion though that what we really need is backup that is not in the house and stored in a well managed location. Given this, Amazon S3 is the best bet in my opinion. You pay a very low ongoing cost and it is stored on huge servers with incredible redundancy.

There are many tools out there to perform the backup itself but I decided to go with S3 Backup as it was easy to setup and had incremental support. Backups seem to be slow (factor of the internet connection upload speed rather than the application/service) but the incremental support will stop this from being a problem. Once again time will tell if the right decision has been made!