Cheap remote backup solution

After reading the madness of what happened to Phil Haack a few weeks ago and a few other people who had VPS’ running on the same machine after a physical hard drive failure everyone on the box (so it seemed) realised that they didn’t have much, if any, backup solution in place. This got me thinking …

There are a number of remote backup solutions for remote servers but they cost money which at the current time I don’t have, and most people don’t have due to the current economical climate. So was checking my email the other day and scrolled to the bottom of the page and noticed that I was only using a small amount of the my gmail account storage. It got me thinking that there was a plug in you could get to use your gmail account a remote storage / mapped network drive. This could be the reliable backup solution I’m looking for.

After doing a bit of Googling about to see if there was anything out there before I set down to write my own solution to this problem I found backup2Gmail on Code Project. Once I realised that you could run this from a command line then I was on to a winner.

So the backup bat file goes along the lines of:

Backup the svn respository using svnadmin to a backup folder (c:\backup\svn)

Checkout the latest code from the repository to a folder in the backup folder (c:\backup\code)

Run the backup 2 gmail command line to backup the c:\backup folder. It then zips it up and sends it to my account.

And that’s it. Put all that into a bat file, put some error checking in to make sure the dirs which are required are there at the beginner, removed at the end etc. and then set it as a scheduled task for some crazy time early in the day (currently set at 3am).

Hope this helps someone else in the future to avoid the heart ache of server failure.

Sofa surfing

After a lot of talk I finally got round to moving my Mac Mini downstairs from the study and hooked it up to my tv over the festive period. It was good as it worked well at our new years party as we watched some youtube videos and played some of my music collection as we drank beer and ate vodka jelly :-)

At the weekend I decided I would buy a wireless keyboard / mouse combination so that it would be a better media pc in my livingroom and not have a random keyboard / mouse on the tv stand.

I found a reasonably cheap keyboard from ebuyer.com and its like a laptop layout without the monitor so I am able to type pretty fast without too many errors in a short amount of time. The keyboard I got is a KeySonic CK-540 RF. It was simple plug'n' play and worked within seconds of plugging it into my Vista install. Also today I booted into Mac OS X to do some updates and it recognised it and then had a couple of configuration questions to workout the keyboard layout but then worked first time. Very impressed with it so far, will post again when I've used it for a while and see how things go :-)

Work lappy

UPDATE: Jon said I can't refer to Lau in the future as 'my wife' yet.

After travelling home the other week I enquired about getting a work laptop so that once I moved up to Leamington Spa I would be able to leave on time (if not a little earlier) and work on the train so I could get home to my wife the woman to be at a reasonable hour (also so I could play some disc golf after work in the summer ... woo!!).

Well last week I got given a new machine! Its not the latest from Dell, but its a reasonable machine and I am quite surprised by it!

The machine I have been given is a ...


...Dell Precision M65.

Spec rundown ...
2Ghz Dual Core 2 Pentium
2.5GB ram
NVIDIA Quadro FX 350M

The thing which has surprised me the most about it is the battery life currently at 88% while I write this and it claims it could do another 3 1/2 hours! I worked on the hour train home the other day, and back with a stop over in Leamington station as the train was running late, restored a 4gb database and worked on the train; and still had 25% battery life remaining. Along with the usual typing I also had music playing, 2 instances of Visual Studio 2005, sql server 2005 running , outlook and other stuff and still worked like a dream!

I hope this can continue and I get lots of work done on trains and the wife woman likes it when I get home from work on time :-)

PS. Only just over 7 weeks to go!!! :-)

The Bourne Ultimatum

I've just seen The Bourne Ultimatum and thought it was pretty good.

I had some mixed reviews from people who had seen it and I wasn't expecting amazing stuff, but I thought it fitted in with the other two films brilliantly and rounded off the trilogy well ... and, just in case, left an opening for a 4th film. Which to be all honest, I hope they don't do because this film tied up many loose ends from the previous two.

At one point it was very reminiscent of X-Men 2 when wolferine goes back to where he had the operation to get his metal grafted on to his skeleton when Bourne goes back to the training facility where it all began ... but other than that, had some action, tense build up and lots of fighting which is what we've come to expect from a Bourne franchise film :-)

Lets just say it will be a box set trilogy which I will be adding to my DVD collection when its released!