Where's All My Stuff
After a recent hard drive failure, I'm in a backup/recovery mindset - thinking about where all my stuff is and whether or not its secure.
Some of it is sitting on hard drives, some of it is in the cloud... but there's no single place where it's all stored. Here's my current setup with notes on where I need improvement:
Hardware
I have an old mac mini that's plugged into a 300GB Lacie hard drive. These are both backed up to mozy.com every day. I also have a 500GB Lacie hub that I use as a backup for larger files and for Time Machine. Time Machine-wise, I plug my laptop into the Lacie hub every few days and let it whir away. I'll have my first chance to test whether it actually works when I get my laptop back with its new HD and try to do a restore.
Bookmarks
This I've done a pretty good job with. They're all sitting in delicious and have been for a long time. I need to look into ways to export these on a regular basis.
Pictures
These are a total mess. They're distributed between flickr, a short stint on TwitPic (before flickr had a url shortener and email/twitter connection), the iPhoto library on my (now dead) laptop, the iPhoto library on my old mac Mini (still kicking, I hope) and a few random CDs I found around the house recently with "photos" written on them. I've been bad and I need a real solution to this problem.
Music
Music is split just as poorly as photos, if not worse. There are a bunch on the laptop and a bunch more on the old mac mini. Both are backed up but not unified into a single iTunes library or even a single HD/iPod.
File systems
File systems (aka applications, settings, etc) are often overlooked. If I had to rebuild my laptop (which I might just have to redo), it would take me a few days to get all the software installed again. Is my etc/hosts file backed up? What about my keychain with all of the various wifi passwords that I've acquired. My firefox saved passwords? I won't be sure if Time Machine is good enough to keep all that stuff until the restore. I'll make sure to update.
Social Network Content
I've overlooked this one completely. Where are all my facebook posts, blog posts, and tweets being saved? The quick answer is that they're not. Even twitter's API currently has a pagination limit that makes it impossible to get back past 3,200 tweets. I've looked into and tried a few solutions (good article on read write web here on how to back them up), but haven't found one yet that will have the number of tweets in the archive match the number that I see next to my avatar on twitter.com. I also don't have an archive of the old molt be blog, nor any of the status updates and wall posts that I've made on facebook (just googled and found this).
Re: Firefox settings - I've been looking into weave as a solution on that front - but that just makes one more software as a service that I'm relying on (flickr, delicious, mozy) not going bankrupt. Ideally, I'd have all those sites funneling into a home solution.
Having switched to gmail back in its early days, it's all still there. I just need to remember to open up Apple Mail once in a while to get the full contents downloaded and into the backup queue. Someday I should bust out my old CD's of college email for nostalgia and put those in there, too.
I'm probably missing something here, so comment below to fill in the blanks if you care to.
Solution
I have an evolving idea for a permanent solution:
Step 1 - Online Activity Archive
Set up various cron jobs to regularly backup all social network stuff. Most of the online activity I'd want to store is publicly available via RSS, but has private bits that make this more difficult than just archiving the feeds. I need to set up oAuth'd applications that suck in facebook, twitter, flickr and delicious on a regularly cron-jobbed basis and save them locally.
Getting data out of google should be easier than expected, thanks to The Data Liberation Front, and really only email is necessary and that can be done through various mail clients.
Step 2 - Combine Disparate Local Resources
I need to suck it up and start keeping all of my photos and music on one hard drive. It's too easy to screw up the backup if they're separate. As this makes portable photos a pain in the ass, the hard drive should be backed up again at home to a machine that puts it in the cloud. That way I can still carry the small HD with me when traveling and not have to worry about losing it and the PC.
Once I have all the Step 1 stuff and Step 2 stuff - I'll need to decide what of that needs to be portable and what's just around for nostalgia. Portable stuff needs to go onto that portable HD and the other stuff can sit on one of the Lacie's connected to the old mini. Of course, this separation won't work if I want to really have all my photos and music in one place...
Step 3 - Mirror laptop to avoid productivity dives when hard drive fails
The setup described in this article on coding horror is probably what I'm going to go for. Three hard drives that are exactly the same as the internal laptop hard drive, one complete mirror, one periodically mirrored and kept off site and a third left blank to serve as a backup should one of the other three (two purchased, one in laptop) fail. If they're exactly the same and mirrored often, when the laptop hard drive fails, I can just swap in the mirror, order a new one online and continue right where I left off.
I could even skip the offsite drive by using a home computer to do backups to a cloud service like mozy. The best reason to have a home computer/router doing backups is that backing up to the cloud can take hours and I don't want to be tethered to the house just to wait for a backup.
