Jeff Atwood's post on backup strategies made me reflect on what I was doing myself to keep my data safe. I don't really have a "backup strategy", though I do try to keep a good backup around (and I'm always careful to, for example, backup my laptop when I'm traveling with it).

But definitely, I have some major holes in my current backup management. Currently, I have a very simplistic backup procedure:

1. Every once in a while I back all my really important files (mail, pictures, documents and so on) over to an external drive that I usually keep connected to my laptop. My backups aren't really huge, so I can easily keep two versions around.
2. Every once in a while (less often) I do a second backup into a 20GB small external drive (what used to be an Archos Gmini 120 MP3 player, now formatted using NTFS). This is small enough that I can easily put this somewhere else as a good second level backup.
3. Regularly I do a third copy of my data into a DVD (yes, the backup of my core stuff still fits in a DVD with a bit of compression).

For (1) and (2) I've been using Microsoft's SyncToy for a number of years, and for the most part it usually works OK (as long as you don't have too many read-only files and make sure no files are in use). It's not perfect, but it does the trick, though I guess I could easily replace it with a batch file and robocopy.

There's one thing I haven't covered yet in my backups: Source Code. Actually, this is for the most part easy because most of it is in source control already, so I don't have too much of a need to back it up explicitly (and most of it is my client's servers, so I don't have to take care of it). I do keep a local CVS repository (yes, one day I'll migrate it off that, I promise!), which I do backup regularly as part of my backup sets.

Though these simple mechanisms have worked for me so far, there are a few significant things I'd definitely like to improve:

1. I'd definitely like to start keeping more offsite backups, and more often.
2. I don't currently backup a number of things, particularly my music collection (ranging around 40GB now). If I lost it, I could rebuild it from a number of sources (CDs, emusic catalog and so on) but I would still lose some of it. Still, backing up that much data is a hassle. I'll probably end up getting a second large external drive for this once I finally get a desktop machine.

A while ago I had given Mozy a quick try, and rather liked the idea. The problem at that time was that our internet access here in Colombia still isn't all that very good (unless you're willing to pay very large sums of money for it). Specifically, we have very crappy upload speeds, which pretty much made a service like Mozy impossible to use effectively.

Recently, after our local phone company started getting some competition this has changed a bit, and now they have doubled our upload speeds to a whooping 256Kbps (on good days!), so I decided to give Mozy a try again. It took all day, but I was able to create and upload a new 850MB backup of some of the most important stuff (mostly documents and such), so at least this gives me hope that I can start using this more effectively now. We'll see.

Backups

A few months ago I signed up again for emusic. The plans are not as good as they used to be, but they are still fairly cheap, and there was tons of new music I wanted to try out. Also helped that finding good music here, particularly if you like Metal, is no easy task.

Here are some of the albums I've recently bought:

• Amorphis: Eclipse
• Axel Rudy Pell: Nasty Reputation
• Iron Savior: Megatropolis
• Metal Church: A Light in the Dark
• Russell Allen / Jorn Lande: The Battle
• Serenity: Worlds Untold & Dreams Unlived
• Sonata Arctica: Unia
• Sunterra: Graceful Tunes
• Therion: Gothic Kabala
• Thought Chamber: Angular Perceptions
• Throes of Dawn: Quicksilver Clouds
• Tiesto: Parade of the Athletes
• TNT: Transistor

Music, emusic

A couple of weeks ago I got myself a new MS Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000, that is, the black one with the split keys, and I'm loving it! I'm using it with my laptop, which I've now got on my desk in a simple stand so that the screen is raised at eye level and it works very nicely.

Before this, I used to use one of the older original Microsoft Natural Keyboards (the split one with the cursor keys in the right position) and I really liked it. It was working perfectly still after several years,  but it was a lot dirtier and the keys made a lot of noise. The new keyboard makes a lot less noise, except for the space key which is usually pretty noisy anyway.

Jeff Atwood posted a review of this keyboard a couple of years ago, so I won't repeat it here; he does a better job of it.

I did use the IntelliType software to change the behavior of a few of the special keys:

• Changed the Web/home key to open Firefox instead of IE.
• I was missing the Suspend key in the old natural keyboard, so I changed the Calculator key to run the following command: "rundll32" powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState. I found this trick somewhere, but I can't seem to remember where now! Unfortunately, it causes my machine to go into hibernate instead of sleep, but I don't mind it too much.
• Remapped the Back and Forward keys to Previous/Next Track instead of controlling the browser.

One thing I did found pretty useless on the keyboard is the zoom thingie. Seems like it only really does something useful with the zoom capabilities in IE7, but since I rarely use IE it's not very useful. Also, it seems to work on most other programs by simulating the some Ctrl+Key combo, which is extremely annoying if you have the "Show location of pointer when I press the CTRL key" option enabled in the mouse settings, like I do.

Keyboards

My website usually has fairly low traffic, given that much of it (or this weblog, for that matter) isn't all that well known and I host few big files. Normally, the monthly bandwidth usage for winterdom.com is between 4.5 and 6 GB.

However, bandwidth usage during october jumped to 16.28 GB! That was a surprise, so I started looking at what might have caused it. From my adsense stats and my usage of Google Analytics, I knew that traffic had increased a bit during this last month on the weblog, but not on the rest of the site, which is normal given that I don't update it often and it is mostly used to host the downloads for my samples.

Also, the RSS subscriber base hasn't changed much in the past few months, and is usually pretty stable, right now between 900-980 subscribers.

A few interesting things I noticed:

• The number of people visiting the site certainly increased, a bit more than I had thought, actually. Usually my weblog didn't got more than 500 pageviews a day, but since October 16 I could see that going a bit above 1000 pageviews.
• As far as I can see, the increase in the number of visitors has not translated into more RSS subscribers, or at least not to the main RSS feed hosted by feedburner.
• The largest usage of bandwidth during october was, apparently PNG image files, accounting for well over 12GB of traffic this month.
• A significant amount of traffic driven to my site during october came from the Visual Studio Express site on MSDN; apparently someone over there liked my Visual Studio Color Schemes .
  The rest of the traffic sources are pretty much the usual ones, like the Windows Workflow Foundation community site, Scott Hanselman's weblog (always a good source of visitors), a few pages scattered around blogs.msdn.com, and  Damien Guard's site.

It's pretty obvious at this point to me, that the most popular entries on this weblog are, by a large margin, my various posts on Visual Studio Color Schemes and my old post about Inconsolata. I'm not sure whether that's a good think or simply means that the "serious" posts I write on technical topics aren't nearly as interesting as I thought they could be .

Anyway, looks like I may want to start considering hosting a few of the screenshots I post on my various posts on a separate site (like flickr) or at least stop posting them as large PNG files. Might as well go over Jeff Atwood's Reducing Your Website's Bandwidth Usage post and see what else might be useful there.

No rush, though, I would still need to serve about 4GB more a month to go over my hosting plan's monthly quota, and I doubt that's going to happen anytime soon! And even so, I suspect the current spike in traffic won't last too long.

Weblog, Bandwith Usage

As I mentioned in a previous post, I did a successful upgrade of my Inspiron 6000 laptop over to Ubuntu 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon) from 7.04 (Feisty Fawn), though sleep/hibernate wasn't working. I spent a some time yesterday trying to fix it, with some partial success.

Niels Olson was kind enough to comment on my post and mentioned some directions that worked for him on his Latidude laptop. I tried some of those, but they didn't work for me, as my laptop has an ATI X300 card instead of an NVidia. However, it gave me some good ideas to play with.

In the end, I wasn't able to get sleep working with the restricted/proprietary ATI drivers (fxglr) so I reverted back to the initial open source Radeon driver. That way I was able to get sleep working back, though the machine still wouldn't come out of sleep successfully (it just locked up).

Finally, I was able to work around this by tweaking a few parameters in /etc/default/acpi-support:

SAVE_VBE_STATE=false
POST_VIDEO=false
SAVE_VIDEO_PCI_STATE=false
USE_DPMS=true

This works, though the video takes a bit of a long time to reestablish once the machine comes up from sleep, but at least it works .

Ubuntu