Skip to main content

PDBS 2015

*PDBS stands for Personal Data Backup Strategy.

I have always been paranoid regarding data loss. That's why I try to follow best practices in backing up data:
  • 2 offline full machine backups to external HDDs, one in Hanoi, one in HCMC. I have done this since a few years ago when I was using the ThinkPad T41 laptop (circa 2007).

    The size of this backup grows linear with time and it is about 300GB these days (with TimeMachine).
  • 1 online backup via Arq to Amazon Glacier for important archival data (how did I flirt with my wife, that kind of serious stuff). Before I started using Arq (early 2013), I made yearly dump of data to DVDs.

    This backup grows slowly until I met Sylvie and it started to explode, going around 150+ GB now. Mostly full size photos.
  • 1 online backup for work related files are put in Dropbox because their apps (Windows and Mac) work really well. I believe they are the only one who uses delta sync, which is super fast. Since work data changes regularly, it makes sense to use something efficient. My Dropbox account currently using 40GB of data. I haven't paid for it though, got the storage via their various promotional programs.
  • At least 1 alternative online backup for codes. I have many public repos on github.com and just as many private ones on bitbucket.org to keep track of code and they act as secondary backups.
  • 1 online backup for media from cameras, smart phones. I use Dropbox on all of my devices. There are about 30GB of photos currently (of the total 40GB Dropbox data). Their mobile apps work well enough across all platform so it just makes sense. For each device, I also use the respective native backup service (Apple = iCloud, Google = Google+, Microsoft = OneDrive).
All in all, there has been no problems so far but I made a change recently and moved archival data (150GB) to OneDrive. The simple reason is Microsoft offers 10TB storage for Office 365 subscribers (which I have been for a few years) and OneDrive photo browser is fairly good. Since this collection of data consists 90% of photos, it's great to be able to quickly find a photo when needed. Also, Arq has proven to be quite complicated and slow (probably because I had never upgraded to version 4). Amazon Glacier is cheap and all but downloading data is time consuming and/or expensive. Most of all, there is no way to browse my data online.

I started uploading to OneDrive 9 days ago (March 8th) and have just finished today. I still have 9.95 TB available, it's beautiful!


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Flutter: Fixing Firebase header not found with Notification Service Extension

If you follow the FCM tutorial Send an image in the notification payload and encountered this error message: 'FirebaseMessaging/FirebaseMessaging.h' file not found You are on the right place, I'm going to show you how to fix it. My app was working fine but one day it stopped compiling. Apparently Flutter 1.20 changed the way it uses CocoaPod so the service extension no longer has the proper library configured. After some tinkering, I came up with this pod config, it has to be added to ios/Podfile below the main Runner target. target 'FcmImage' do use_frameworks! use_modular_headers! require File.expand_path('../.symlinks/plugins/firebase_core/ios/firebase_sdk_version.rb', __FILE__) firebase_sdk_version = firebase_sdk_version! pod 'Firebase/Messaging', "~> #{firebase_sdk_version}" end FcmImage is my extension name, replace it with yours We can use a hardcoded version for Firebase/Messaging pod but doing so m...
Post a Comment
Read more

IMAP module for PHP in Mac OS X Mountain Lion

So here it comes again. I have recently upgraded to Mountain Lion and for whatever reason, Apple decided to nuked all my previous PHP (among other things) configurations so I have to setup IMAP in PHP again. A simple Google search may point you to this post with detailed instruction for Lion however, some steps have been changed a bit... Step 1: Install prerequisites You may choose to download Xcode ( FREE ) from the App Store then go to menu Xcode > menu item Preferences > tab Downloads, select to install Command Line Tools OR you can go to Apple Developer  to get it, you may need to login. Step 2: Compile IMAP Get the IMAP source code from University of Washington website . Please do me a favor and check that website for the latest version, it's good practice. If you that laz y , try to click the "y" to get direct link to 2007f version. Extract the package and open the Terminal to the new directory before executing these command: make osx EXTRACFLAG...
9 comments
Read more

OAuth with Google, Twitter and... Facebook!

This is sick! Just a few days ago, I ran into OAuth as I want to get my GMail feed based on Google Data API . I succeeded. With a little help of an OAuth open source ( here , available in several programming languages). Then I remember that I once heard that Twitter also uses OAuth as an authentication option so I turned into Twitter and had a good read. Finally, I found out that they are basically the same (hehe, it's obvious since OAuth 1.0 is a worldwide standard). I had an idea of writing a universal class which can handle both Google and Twitter OAuth functionalities. It's not too hard. I took most of the idea from the PHP example ( here , PHP only). I also made a small script which accepts URI to send and intercept response from Google & Twitter servers. At that moment, I was so excited with all the ideas but actually it has no real world benefit so I just left it there... Until today, in the F8 (says "fate") conference of Facebook, I was stunned fin...
10 comments
Read more