Another (Probably Better) Approach to Backup

My backup system is failing. The latency is getting to a month or more,
and it's very tiresome. I'm seriously thinking of switching to this hard
core strategy, which seems easy and effective, but costs money to get
going. I'm pasting the text here so I can always find it and it won't
disappear, but it's from here:

http://jwz.livejournal.com/801607.html
(lots of useful, mostly mac-specific comments below)

--

Dear Lazyweb, and also a certain you-know-who-you-are who should certainly
know better by now,

I am here to tell you about backups. It's very simple.

Option 1: Learn not to care about your data. Don't save any old email, use
a film camera, and only listen to physical CDs and not MP3s. If you have
no posessions, you have nothing to lose.

Option 2 goes like this:

You have a computer. It came with a hard drive in it. Go buy two more
drives of the same size or larger. If the drive in your computer is SATA2,
get SATA2. If it's a 2.5" laptop drive, get two of those. Brand doesn't
matter, but physical measurements and connectors should match.
Get external enclosures for both of them. The enclosures are under $30.
Put one of these drives in its enclosure on your desk. Name it something
clever like "Backup". If you are using a Mac, the command you use to back
up is this:
sudo rsync -vaxE --delete --ignore-errors / /Volumes/Backup/

If you're using Linux, it's something a lot like that. If you're using
Windows, go fuck yourself.

If you have a desktop computer, have this happen every morning at 5AM by
creating a temporary text file containing this line:
0 5 * * * rsync -vaxE --delete --ignore-errors / /Volumes/Backup/

and then doing sudo crontab -u root that-file

If you have a laptop, do that before you go to bed. Really. Every night
when you plug your laptop in to charge.

If you're on a Mac, that backup drive will be bootable. That means that
when (WHEN) your internal drive scorches itself, you can just take your
backup drive and put it in your computer and go. This is nice.
When (WHEN) your backup drive goes bad, which you will notice because your
last backup failed, replace it immediately. This is your number one
priority. Don't wait until the weekend when you have time, do it now,
before you so much as touch your computer again. Do it before goddamned
breakfast. The universe tends toward maximum irony. Don't push it.
That third drive? Do a backup onto it the same way, then take that to your
office and lock it in a desk. Every few months, bring it home, do a
backup, and immediately take it away again. This is your "my house burned
down" backup.
"OMG, three drives is so expensive! That sounds like a hassle!" Shut up. I
know things. You will listen to me. Do it anyway.

Update: Mac users: for the backup drive to be bootable, you need to do two
things:

When you partition the drive, use GUID, not Apple Partition Map;
Get Info on the drive and un-check "Ignore ownership on this drive" under
"Ownership and permissions."
You can test whether it's bootable by holding down Option while booting
and selecting the external drive.

----

UPDATE: I have now implemented this system. Well not all of it - I don't have a backup backup hard drive. But I bought a spacious hard drive that is compatible with my computer's internal HD (not that swapping it in will be a piece of cake, but possible), and an enclosure with a fast connection (USB 2.0/Firewire). It wasn't too expensive. I use a program for the mac called Carbon Copy Cloner to automatically backup all changes every week at noon. This hard drive is also bootable - I tried it out. A nicer thing to have would be Apple's Time Machine, which keeps track of many old versions of your files too, but for my geriatric computer and price range Carbon Copy Cloner works well, if slowly, and there are no doubt thousands of similar applications for the PC (and if you're using Linux you're probably comfortable enough with using rsync on the command line). So I'm feeling a lot more secure about my data now. The critical points are that it's *automatic*, it backs up *everything* (don't have to manually add files to backup), and it's *bootable* (so I'm not stuck when my hard drive dies).

How to Ship A Lot of Books Across Canada

BEFORE YOU START

You will need a bunch of boxes, and a tape dispenser (the kind with a
handle and teeth). You can get the boxes from behind a liquor store, or in
the cardboard-only dumpster behind many other kinds of businesses (there's
one behind the McDonald's on Princess in Kingston). You want smallish
boxes, about the size of a cat carrier at most. I found that some of the
plain brown cardboard boxes started to fall apart in transit. What
survived much better were the wine (or wine-making kit?) boxes, which were
shiny and strong, and a nice shape.

You also need a big piece of floor, for the next step.

PREPARING THE BOOKS

This step might not seem necessary, but for me it was the secret, to
making it both manageable and efficient. Pull all the books off the
shelves, every single one, putting them into piles by *size*. In my
collection there are 4 main sizes: pocket book, trade paperback, oversize
trade paperback, hard cover (or super sized trade paperback), and
textbook. If one is not an exact fit for a category, you can always err on
the larger size. And then one more pile for "weird shape" books (which
included a lot of coffee table books for me, since they vary in size).

First of all this lets you see just how big the job is, and how many boxes
you'll need. It's a process that is easy and satisfying. Secondly, it lets
you pack the boxes by size, which is both a very good way to fill the
space and fast - once you've discovered what orientation they will fit in,
you can drop them in by the armful. It had the expected side effect for me
that they are sorted by size when I took them *out* of the box, so I could
fit them to my variable height of bookshelves.

Once a box is full of a certain size of books, you can then fit the
weird-shaped books, and also magazines, in around the sides. One problem I
haven' was that some of these books got damaged around the edges - maybe
it would be better to pack that with clothes or something. Especially if
you use the brown cardboard, this is not a method that can guarantee to
keep your books in mint condition.

I made up some address labels on MS word, which saved some time.

AT THE POST OFFICE

First of all, there is no longer any "book shipping rate" via greyhound or
viarail or some such. At least none that I could find via internet search.
Please tell me if there's an alternative. But as far as I can see you've
got to go canada post.

My big secret here is to tape smaller boxes together, using packing tape
they supply, and that's cheaper. My dad has known this trick for years,
but I went so far as to geek out and prove why that's true. I spent a fair
bit of time experimenting with the online package rate calculator, and
these are my findings, valid as of January 2008:

- Canada Post rates are calculated by weight, unless the dimensions become
oversized, at which point it is calculated by size.
- The formula is $1.18 per kg + $8.70 (when not oversized) This may not
include the fuel surcharge I just realized, so may underestimate by $1-3.
- Switching to the oversize will always make it more expensive, so you
want to avoid that. The formula is to add up all 3 dimensions in
centimeters, multiply by $0.56, and subtract $50.52.
- The rules for when something becomes oversized are complex, and I didn't
figure them out entirely. Things can be bigger if they're heavier, and I
suspect the more cubic something is (and so hard to pack) the lower the
threshold. A medium box packed with books won't be oversize, but if you
tape a bunch together it might be. Your best bet is to consult with the
person at the post office to make sure you don't go over.

You can see the logic of taping boxes together now: since a 0 kg box costs
$8.70, that's how much you save everytime you tape together two boxes.

At the post office is the place to make sure they're really well taped up.
Some of mine not so much, and there were rips in the cardboard.

That's basically all I've figured out, besides make sure to have a car or
a friend with a car on both ends (my awesome dad actually did the final
mailing on the Victoria side)

THE COST

I shipped the equivalent of about 19 wine-kit sized boxes of books,
8x12x14 inches each (so a bit more than 22 feet on the shelf), for
$319.42. A typical box, actually two taped together, was 16 kg and about
$30. It hurt, but it was sure nice to be reunited. Like all book-loving
people, building a proper home (not a temporary home), I'm just going to
have to get used to this whole process happening every few years.

If you're reading this and know any tips, I'd love to hear them. The
biggest thing that would have helped me: improved tape despenser
technique. I still can't get the hang of that, and end up completely taped
to myself.

Souvenir Folders, Pouches of the Past

The first time I organized in any way shape or form was halfway through my
first term in residence. I was trying to clean up entirely, for
essentially the first time (I was a pig. Still basically am). I found
places for all the things I needed to function, and threw out a lot more,
but then I was still left with papers that I wanted to hang onto, even
though I didn't need them. That was the key revelation: that I want to
keep them for the *memories* associated with them. They were souvenirs.
Which is a totally legitimate reason to keep something. Here's the system
I came up with.

Every 4 months I start a new big yellow envelope (whatever they're
called). 4 months because that's the schedule I ran on for years in
school, and still feels like a natural way to segment my life. I write on
it Souvenirs 2007 Sept - Dec for instance. In there goes anything flat I
want to save to remind me of that period: ticket stubs, show posters,
personal letters and postcards, notes from people and from myself,
newspaper clippings. Then after the 4 months it's effectively sealed
(though not literally, since I will often find things later on that belong
in there). How to deal with 3D objects? Well there aren't that many of
them. But in some cases, I suppose you could take a lot of photos of it,
and put those in the folder...

I've adopted the same system for computer files: images and text off the
internet (and increasingly, flash videos downloaded from YouTube that
reflect something that affected me at the time - like Obama's recent
primary speech answering the accusation that he was about "just words"),
bits of work by me and friends. I also use it now to archive all the
personal email, digital photos (including other peoples'), and substantial
MSN chats that I have over the 4 months. They all go in the same folder,
which is named like 2007 Sept-Apr - I discovered if I used that
convention, alphabetical is the same as chronological order (Jan - May -
Sept).

This means that all this stuff is out of my current workspace, but is
safely preserved. Once in a while I will go back to one of those old
folders and crack it open, and it's like the aroma of that time in my life
comes pouring out: fears, excitements, people and places. It's important
to start being the librarian of your own life right now, because that
stuff will zoom into the past so fast. Do *you* remember what was on your
mind in say, the winter of 2004?

Quick Reference Check Trick

This is for a pretty limited audience, but I find it so useful I'm
putting it here so I don't forget it.

If you are writing an academic paper with citations, and you're worried
about getting the formatting of them wrong - especially if you use an
automatic reference manager like EndNote - this is a way to quickly step
through every reference in a Word document. It only works if your
references are in APA style or similar, that is, (Schlemiel & Schnook,
2007)

1. Go to Edit -> Find
2. Click the More button
3. Select Use wildcards
4. Type into the Find what box (exactly): [0123456789]\)

Now just keep clicking Find Next and it will take you on a tour of all the
references in your document.

If you are using EndNote, it's also a good idea to search for "#" and "{"
just to make sure there aren't any unprocessed tags you've left.

The ABC System for Prioritizing Projects

I keep a list of projects in my PDA, frequently updated (at the very least
once a week). When I started doing that after a while I found the length
of the list overwhelming - and a lot of it were things that I'd just like
to make progress on if I had extra time, but weren't that urgent. So now I
put a letter in front of each project name (which makes it sort the list
this way):

A: Top priority projects, must be significantly progressed *this week*.
Often need to be finished this week.

B: Projects that are a bit time sensitive, or important, but nothing bad
will happen if I don't make any progress this week.

C: Projects I would like to get done, but nothing bad would happen if I
didn't get to them in the next 4 months or so. Or else they are time
sensitive, but really unimportant so it would be ok to let it go. Should
keep next actions on the todo lists, but no worries if I don't get to the
todo item for a long time.

This is why frequently reviewing it is absolutely essential: B items can
become A items! Todo list items in my PDA can have a priority from 1-5. So
it's natural to associate 1 with A, etc. for the todo items associated
with a project.

5 Things To Do When Starting a New Project

1 Make space for it. First clear your desk of other projects, by filing
away or dumping into your inbox. Then choose a name (or code name), very
important, and making a file folder for it (under Zillion Folder Filing).
Take out a blank piece of paper, the first piece of paper for the folder,
and use that for things 2-4.

2 Purpose. Write it down in about 1 sentence, why you're taking on this
project.

3 Outcome visioning. Envision WILD SUCCESS for your project. Try to
imagine as many details of what that would look like as possible.

In case you need encouragement, Bill Drummond says:

"We all have the capacity for unlimited fantasy, it is the fuel of genius.
Do not be afraid to turn on the tap and let it flow. ... Fantasy can be a
dangerous area to delve into, an unreal place to escape into. Fantasy is
also the place where everything starts from. The place where a personality
can grow. ... Do not be afraid of your fantasies. Dive into them."

4 Subprojects. Break the project into subprojects that you can pursue and
finish independent of each other, as many as possible. Think of one
concrete, physical action, no matter how small, you can do towards each
one. If some of those subprojects look big and intimidating by themselves,
you might want to repeat these steps 1-5 for it.

5 I Have Decided. Write that as a heading, with lots of space underneath,
and quickly make and write down as many decisions as you can think of
about the project: when you want to finish it by, when and how you'll work
on it, what you *wont* do for it as well as what you will, even when and
how you'll make other decisions.

(This is basically David Allen's "natural planning", with a few tweaks of
mine)