Anyone interested in the whole home backup question, as I apparently am, should check out Greg Keene's description of his NAS and backup solution. He's using Amazon's S3, too. While I'm not ready to run out and buy a RAID for home, it is still an interesting read.
I have a little side project that involves a website for a journal. I recently moved hosts, and installed the very cool Mint stats package to track use. Even though I only have a week worth of stats, I found a few interesting observations.
Because this isn't a tech site I think we can assume that the population visiting is going to be more representative of the population at large than, oh, say, sites like this here blog. This is reinforced in my mind because two-thirds of visitors to this site come via search. Oh, that's the first interesting stat. In fact, it looks like only about a quarter of visitors type the URL in directly. (The remainder follow links from other pages.) I think this speaks to the power of search in today's internet.
Next, looking at the browsers in use, we have IE with 63%, Firefox with 26%, and Safari with 9%. I'm very surprised that Firefox and Safari are as high as they are. So, chalk this one up as a win for non-IE browsers. But, let's stay on the topic of IE for a moment. I'd assume that there would be a decent spread of users from older versions, like 5.x. But, I saw only a handful of users with 5.x. Nearly fifty percent of total visitors are using IE6, and a surprising 14% had IE7.
Fourteen percent of visitors were on a Mac, a number higher than I would have guessed. And, as a victory for designers who want more space, only 7% of users were running their monitors at 800x600.
Now, given that Mint uses javascript code to track stats, it is possible that older machines and older browsers aren't counted here. But, I was still surprised at how many folks are running very modern equipment out there.
Since Amazon's S3 web service seems to be everywhere, I thought I'd chime in with my experiences.
I'm a big fan of the concept of backing up data to an internet-based server. You have the joy of letting someone else deal with the hardware coupled with the safety of off-site backups. As an added bonus, often the data is available over the web, making files handy to access at work, for example.
So, I've been on the hunt for the perfect solution to back my data up to the cloud. At first, I used Xdrive, back in the days when I was backing up a windows box. At the time, I actually had trouble with the service crashing my machine. I'm not sure if was the service or my box, so your milage may very on this one.
Next, I moved to Joyent's Strongspace, using rsync for the backup. I actually had this working really well on my windows box. But, I only had four or five gigs of space available, so I wasn't backing up any of our audio files, so that wasn't ideal. (More capacity was, of course, available, but it got fairly pricey.) On the plus side, they have a great web-based file browser. Then, I moved back to the Mac, and I wasn't able to get the system to work quite right. Something about the SSH/rsync/cron combo just wasn't working right, and I never managed to get the system working automatically. Then, Joyent changed their pricing, and the whole thing started to look much less appealing.
Thus, back to the topic of S3. After reading a bunch of info on the web, I tried out JungleDisk. This handy little app basically lets you access your S3 account in the same way you would access any local network disk. I've been using IMSafe to do the automatic backups. IMSafe seems pretty easy to use, if lacking somewhat in flexibility (ie, there doesn't seem to be a way to exclude directories from a backup). And, I'm not 100% sure I have everything working automatically yet. But, it looks like I'm able to do backups. And, so far, backing up to S3 seems to be much, much cheaper than the other options I've seen.
I just noticed that JungleDisk has added automatic backups to the list of features, so I'll be checking that out, too.
Update: Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you the big problem with net-based backups. Doing incremental backups is fine and dandy, but doing the initial full backup takes forever!
Three items, all related to work. Not my work, but the notion of work in general. The connections I leave as an exercise for the reader, although I must warn you to not read too much into it. The question of what we should do with our limited time is one of the key questions we face, and I, for one, find it to be an endless fascinating subject.
Item 1: Christina Wodtke's Three-Pronged Fork in the Road, where she explains the three career options facing us (or, in this case, those who work on the web with an IA slant) as becoming a manager, becoming an expert, or becoming "you 2.0". I've taken the first fork, but occasionally feel angst about not taking the second fork, and wonder if I'm not actually closer to the third fork than I think.
Item 2: Ben Casnocha on cross-training your brain. Ben points to an interesting article on the topic in Fortune. From the article:
"It may well be a mistake to do just one thing," says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School. "If you practice multiple things you actually get better at any one of those things." In other words the benefits of practicing one skill are not limited to that skill alone; they can be transferred.
This, I love, if only because it quells some of the angst I occasionally feel about not being super deep in one given topic. Actually, let's not oversell this angst idea. I've always enjoyed being, in Ben's words, "a mile wide" (literally, not figuratively). Knowing a lot about a lot is generally a good strategy (unless one is looking for a job). And, I've purposefully taken up pursuits unrelated to my job and/or training (e.g. learning the violin as an adult) in order to stretch myself.
Item 3: Michael Ruhlman is fast becoming one of my favorite authors. Ruhlman writes about work and workmanship. It seems as if every book of his I've read so far (Wooden Boats, House, Charcuterie) has a strong theme of work running under the surface, occasionally becoming explicit. I imagine that his other books (a number on chefs and one about a hospital) keep the theme up.
My favorite of the three I've read was Wooden Boats, essentially an homage to the craftsman building an object (I almost called it a product) that Ruhlman juxtaposes against modern "plastic" boats--the epitome of our throw-away culture. I really should give it a more in-depth review...I'll put it on my to-do list.
I'll be a panelist at the MIT Enterprise Forum of the Northwest's dinner program: Classrooms Today, Clicks Tomorrow: The Future of Digital Learning (Jan. 17). If you're in the Seattle area (the event is in Bellevue) and you're interested in the topic, come on by...
Since I have a bit of time today, I'm catching up on some old backup-related links I've run across in the past few months.
First, Aaron Swartz's request for a simple backup solution. A few interesting things to note: the people commenting on this don't seem to get it. He's looking for something that just works, and everyone seems to be pitching pretty geek-focused tools. And, Swartz is willing to pay someone to develop a good solution...I hope someone takes him up on the offer.
Next, digging way back into my archives, I found Jeremy Zawodny's description of an Amazon S3-based system. Be sure to read the comments, or at least the list of tools mentioned. I haven't had a chance to try any of these out yet, but the Jungle Disk + Apple Backup solution looks interesting.
My current solution is a bit too manual...I never could get it all automated. But, it might make sense to switch from Strongspace to S3.