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A little self-indulgence

 

I just completed the RPM Challenge.  The premise is to write and record 10 songs (or 35 minutes) of original music during the month of February.  I have made excuses not to do this challenge for the past couple of years, but I finally did it this year.  Here is my 6-song (but over 35 minute) album on Soundcloud.  Perhaps the music will inspire me to write more blog posts about technology and music/audio recording.  I think that it is an important skill for everyone to have.  Sure, we may not all be aspiring musicians, but recording audio for podcasts or videos comes in very handy.

Words Just Written on the Paper by witmerm

Areca

 

As I have said before, I am obsessed with backups.  It all stems from the time I blasted my wife’s documents folder into oblivion.  Obviously, this had a negative and lasting impact on me.  Since that time, I have been trying to do what I can to avoid any potential disaster (either man-made, of Matt-made). 

Currently, I am using several backup strategies.  I think the most important strategy is to get an off-site backup system in place.  There are several services that are reasonably priced (e.g., Carbonite, CrashPlan, etc.) that provide a simple off-site backup system.  There are also other systems that are not direct backup software, but would work if setup correctly (e.g., Dropbox, Live Mesh, etc.).  I prefer to use a system I discussed before called Wuala.  It is very similar to Dropbox and Live Mesh, in that files can be synced and shared across multiple computers.  The additional feature of Wuala is that you can trade storage on your machine in order to get storage in the cloud.  I have a Linux server and a Windows Media PC that are on 24-7.  Each computer shares 100 GB, which means I have 200 GB of off-site cloud storage.  Free is a lot cheaper that buying that type of storage from another service.

So that is my first strategy.  I have other strategies that I think are important.  The off-site prevents a disaster (e.g., theft, fire, flood, etc.) from destroying all of your hard drives, computers, and other equipment; however, I also believe that local backups are important.  Specifically, I think local backups are important in order to keep multiple versions of files.

Multiple versions of files allow you to go back in time if you do something ridiculously stupid (which I have been known to do with documents).  Maybe you are working on your tax return and your 5 year-old decides to do some creative clicking when you aren’t looking.  If you can’t undo, you can always revert to an earlier version if your backup software is capable of this.

At home, I use a program installed on my Linux server called BackupPC to backup my server file share, and three Windows computers.  This is a great open source backup system, but it is not for the faint-of-heart to setup and configure.  Which brings me to Areca.

Areca is an open source program that does incremental backups.  Incremental backups just backup what has changed since the last backup, not the entire files and folders.  This means that the first time you backup files, the system might take some time.  After the first backup, only the changed files are backed up.  Although this is a common feature of backup software, it is nice.  What is also nice is that you can configure Areca to compress all of the files to zip format.  If you are backing up a lot of text files, spreadsheets, etc., compressing the files will greatly decrease the size of the files. 

An additional feature of Areca is that the manner in which the backups are stored.  Most backup software stores the data in a way that requires the software needs to be installed in order to recover the files.  This can be problematic.  Areca files can be recovered with any software that can open a zip file.  Although Areca has an interface for easily recovering files, it is nice to know that you are not bound to use Areca in order to recover the files.  

Areca is not without some learning curve and initial configuration, but there is sufficient documentation on the website.  The most challenging part is configuring the backup schedule.  In order to make Areca backup on a schedule (instead of manually clicking buttons each day), you have to create a schedule.  I used the example on the website (“Backup strategy”), which does the following:

• All daily archives of the last 7 days
• A weekly archive between the last week (7 days) and the last 4 weeks
• A monthly archive between the last month (4 weeks) and the last 6 months
• A single archive over 6 months

In order to run the backups automatically, you have to use the Windows Task Scheduler.  I think this is the most intimidating task; however, it is typically a set-it-and-forget-it process.

Overall, I like Areca for its simplicity, configurability, and the fact that it is open source.  I think it makes a wonderful program to use on individual computers to keep versions of important files.