n3wblog

tech commentary and observations from the early 21st century

1. bodensatz 04.09.06 / 2pm

   I don’t quite understand your conundrum but it sounds like you are bitten by the ol’ subscription game. Nobody wants to sell anything anymore, they want to sell subscriptions since they are far more profitable.

   A good backup solution I like is rsync, since it only copies the deltas even with a binary file. Very quick way to back things up to another machine in-house.
2. boolean 04.09.06 / 2pm

   my issue is that the service they’re providing is often unavailable or spotty. Sync’ing calendars, keychains and address books between two macs works very well when it’s available, but it is slow and often unavailable. It bugs me that they provide this subscription for a service that should just be implemented as a local synchronization system on a home network. It works differently than rsync because there’s a UI for consolodating differences between two installations — you can have two (or more) copies that are out of sync with each other and merge differences based on which entry is correct.

   The Backup application is also very good and works similarly to rsync (or actually rdiff-backup). It still requires an active subscription to .Mac to work. In this case, .Mac acts like a software dongle.

   rsync works well and I use that for some types of backups (my music collection). I used to use rdiff-backup which keeps deltas of every point in time so you can roll back to a particular date, unlike rsync which just keeps you snapshotted with the most-recent version. They’re both useful and have their place. The reason I like using Backup, and the reason I will likely continue to subscribe to .Mac is because it works nicely and has a convenient UI for rolling back and restoring.

   how’s your backup solution working?
3. bodensatz 04.09.06 / 2pm

   Ah, OK, now I understand! Yeah, that is pretty stoopid. So it’s like the windoze briefcase, sorta. BTW, I thought rsync had options for reconciling in both directions like that. I’ve never used them, though.

   Yeah, my backups were working great until I changed my root MySQL password and forgot to change it in my backup script. Thank goodness for the Google way-back machine - it’s already recovered 6 significant articles for me. Though failed to recover 2 more.

   My backups scripts will be back, only better, stronger, faster … (and checking for failure and notifying me of such)
4. boolean 04.09.06 / 2pm

   Glad you’re recovering your stuff and you didn’t lose much. You guys had a rough week last week with the power outage (did you get hit with that?) and server wonkiness.

   I think rsync can do reconciliation but it’s file-based and wouldn’t be too helpful at reconciling individual chunks in a binary file. iCal’s .ics files are all binary so a file-based backup system would only be useful for storing the latest version. If I could find better calendar software I would consider using it, but I’m hooked. It’s either that or I go back to using calendar in emacs.
5. bodensatz 04.09.06 / 3pm

   yeah, we were power-outed for about 12 hours.

   i know that with unidirectional rsync it is quite decidedly not file-based and only xfers the delta across even for a binary file, that’s one of it’s largest selling points. Not sure if this applies as well when using it bidirectonally, but would be worth some experimentation (or RTFM :-))
6. boolean 04.09.06 / 8pm

   by file-based I meant that it makes the file on the remote end the same as the copied file. So you’ve got the latest version of the file in your backup. By merging, I meant that you’re given the option to pick which records in an ics file are the masters whether it’s on the source or target system. You’re able to splice files together this way with direction from the user.

   .Mac could still be better, but the synching of calendars and address books is something rsync isn’t designed to do.

   ps, I have some links to using rdiff-backup and rsync on the Mac here: Living with tiger.
7. bodensatz 04.10.06 / 6am

   Ahhh, OK, now I get it. Yeah, that would be tough to do without internal knowledge of the file format

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