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

I'm a heavy user of the command line on Windows, and for a number of years I've used the open source Console application instead of running plain cmd.exe as my console of choice.

I currently have mine setup to host both cmd.exe as well as powershell, and do make heavy use of the Tabbed interface when I need to keep multiple prompts open.

It's a really cool utility and you can certainly configure it with a lot more eye candy if you like, like alpha transparency, custom backgrounds and so on. Me, I like my setup pretty minimal.

I've been trying to keep more up to date with the releases of some of the utilities I run on a daily basis, and Console is no exception. I'm currently running build 2.00.138, which was recently released.

If you're using older releases of the Console 2.0 beta set, then I highly recommend updating to this latest one. A few of the previous builds had some repainting issues that sometimes caused the console display to be corrupted or missing characters, but this latest build has been working great for me and the display update actually seems a bit faster for me.

Console, Tools

I just ran into Vimperator today. It's a Firefox add-on that enables VIM-like functionality directly info Firefox! I installed it to see what it's like and it seems pretty interesting (though not sure whether I'll get used to it or no).

By default, Vimperator hides the Firefox menu and toolbar, but many common Firefox keybindings still work.

As you would expect, you can open a site on the current tab using the :e command (tab will present a list of candidate URLs based on what you've typed so far). Using :open or o/O also works, and t/:tabopen can be used to open a URL in a new tab.

You can also close the current tab using :bd. Also, switching between tabs can either be done Ctrl+Tab/Ctrl+PgDown/Up or using :b[n]. where [n] is the tab number.

The usual Vim navigation keys (hjkl) can be used for scrolling around the page, among

Overall, seems like a pretty nifty add-on, so I'll try it for a while to see how it goes.

Update: Couple of things I've noticed to watch out for:

1. When completing URLs to open, the order of the entries in the list seems to be pretty random, instead of how Firefox usually does it (most used entries listed first). This can be a bit annoying.
2. The new modes do block out the GMail and Google Reader key shortcuts from working. To use them, you first need to press I and then they will work normally (press Esc to go back to normal mode).

Firefox, Vimperator

A few months back I commented that I had gone back to using Vim as my text editor when not using Visual Studio, and to be honest, I haven't regretted that at all.

I'm not a Vim power user by any measure, but I do get around and I'm constantly learning and looking for new bits and trying to get them into my muscle memory. It's a bit hard, but it's already been very productive and I'm slowly getting the hang of it.

Now, I had used Vim before this many years ago, but I now realize that I didn't really "get" Vim at that time. Sure, I could open, edit and save files, but I wasn't really tapping into the features that make Vim so powerful as an editor.

I also realized that one of the things that was seriously keeping me form becoming a better vimmer was that having to push two completely different kinds of text editing metaphors into my finger's muscle memory (and my own memory, for that matter) was simply too hard. While I tried to learn a few Vim tricks here and there, I would always fall back to the old classic text editing used throughout windows (and, most importantly, in my primary editor: VS).

I also realized that I really didn't get the power of Vim's three modes (normal/insert/visual). In particular, I never really learned how to use Visual mode effectively.

This time, however, I set out to remedy that. After learning a bit more about Vim and getting the hang of a few things, I finally caved in and got a copy of ViEmu, after having it recommended to me by both Aaron Jensen and John Lam.

This is a fantastic tool and has made, for me, all the difference in the world. ViEmu pretty much puts a substantial piece of Vim's power as a text editor right inside Visual Studio (and it works great with VS2008, by the way). This meant that I could now seriously learn more Vim tricks and be able to take advantage of them in both my main text editors.

Having that capability makes it a lot more worthwhile and encouraging to actually spend time improving my Vim skills. I'm still not even a mediocre vimmer, but I'm now using it much more effectively. Seriously, if you want to learn Vim, and are a .NET or Visual Studio developer, you ought to take a good look at ViEmu; I can't recommend it enough.

By the way, ViEmu got a slight price increase, but even at the new price it is well worth it and more than pays for itself. The licensing model works great as well: It is licensed per-user, which means I can install my copy, for example, in my three development virtual machines.

If I spent enough time inside MS Word, I'd buy the Word version as well (fortunately, I don't!). I'm sure I've left a few ":w" inside a document or two .

Vim, ViEmu, Text Editors

Aaron Jensen has put up a short screencast on using Vim, showing some of the tricks you can use when editing text with it; very cool stuff.

Some other Vim resources that might be interesting:

• Daniel Webb has a few short videos on Vim.
• Vim: 7 Habits for Effective Text Editing. A lecture by Vim creator Bram Moolenar. A little on the long side, but some useful things here and there.
• MacVim: I don't use a Mac, but this looks way cool (I love Vim, but it is ugly ).
• A couple of good Vim tutorials.

Vim