Daring Fireball: An Ode to DiskWarrior, SuperDuper, and Dropbox
Hard drives are fragile. Read as much as you can bear to about how they work, how incredibly precisely they must operate in order to cram so many bits onto such small disks. It’s a miracle to me that they work at all. Every hard drive in the world will eventually fail. Assume that yours are all on the cusp of failure at all times. It’s good to be spooked about how long your hard drives will last.
John’s article, advice, and success story about doing smart backup is exactly the reminder that a lot of people need to hear right this second. Because, it’s impossible to overstate the importance of automated, redundant, and rotated backups. Trust me. You will need them all. Soon. Repeatedly. Forever. Always.
Worst of all, every stupid cliche about backup that currently makes you roll your eyes in exasperation will be visited upon you tenfold if you’re not using some flavor of the anal-retentive system nerds like John and I live by. Because, unfortunately, most people you know (including me) have already repeatedly been struck by backup’s biggest and most profound cliche:
Perform automated, redundant, and rotated backups as often as you can afford to lose every single bit of information that’s been changed or added since your last backup. Because it’s going to go away.
Seriously:
Doing any one of these things by itself or in tandem produces “a copy.” A copy is handy, and it may really save you, even a majority of the time. But, making casual copies is optimistic at best. Someday, you will need the benefits of all three layers, and you’ll thank John, me, and your chosen $diety that you sweated all those years of monkey work and aggravation.
I do have three suggestions to append to John’s excellent setup:
You’re so sick of hearing this: automated, redundant, and rotated.
Also, a second high-five for DiskWarrior. I can’t count the number of times that this annoying, ugly, slow, and hard-to-use application has saved every last strip of my bacon. Like John says, yeah, start with Disk Utility, because it’s got 90+% of the firepower needed to fix the disk problems you’ll encounter this year. But, DiskWarrior will do everything right up to the impossible. And, again, yes: you will need it. I sure have.
Backup is boring, it’s tedious, and it’s not cheap. But once you’ve had your ass handed to you by a badly-broken drive, you really get the importance of a zero-latency recovery. It’s positively liberating.
But, for now, right this second: go Gmail your kid’s baby pictures to yourself. Do it.
I realize I’m asking you to buy a lot of hard drives here. Can’t change that, but I will say I’ve been very satisfied with 1TB Seagate Barracudas from New Egg (Personally, I buy them five at a time and always have at least 3 spares). The performance is fine, if unremarkable, in both my Macs and my two Drobos. Plus, the price is right, and New Egg is, in my experience, a proven and bulletproof retailer. Also, if you’re the tidy type, you can cheaply pick up a case of Wiebetech boxes to transport and store your naked drives. ↩
”Yes. Another Backup Lecture.” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 15, 2010. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"
Puppy!: This is a larger article about why Joel Spolsky is going to stop blogging, but I really appreciated this bit at the end.
Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.
Generally speaking, I feel exactly the same way, and I don’t think anyone has summed Twitter up more concisely or eloquently. This of course raises the question of why I still have a Twitter account…
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Like, Python: I can’t decide whether this is stupid, or awesome:
Like, Python uses Python’s own tokenizer to essentially add keywords to Python’s lexical understanding. Python is a subset of Like, Python, so any script you’ve already written in Python is valid Like, Python and will run in the interpreter. But you can also write like you’d speak.
So, you get something like this:
#!usr/bin/python
This was sent to me by Seth Gottlieb. Figures.
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The Database of Intentions Is Far Larger Than I Thought: John Battelle updates his Database of Intentions to include concepts like The Social Graph and The Status Update from the social networking explosion since he last wrote about it.
Taken together (and honestly, there’s really no other way to think about it, to my mind), these signals form a Database of Intentions that is magnitudes of order larger, more complex, and more powerful than my original concept back in 2003. And while the current players in each category are clear, what’s also clear is that the battle is on to control each of these critical signals.
Before reading this, you really need to read the first Database of Intentions post from back in 2003. Or his book.
I absolutely believe in the Database of Intentions. Both in a larger, Internet sense, and in an organizational, intranet sense. It seems simple – what people are searching for and clicking through to is what people want. That concept, however, often gets ignored in when doing more practical things like content planning or traffic analysis.
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gigapan: Gotta say that I’m kinda smitten with Gigapan.
The GigaPan process allows users to upload, share, and explore brilliant gigapixel+ panoramas from around the globe.
People take and upload panoramic photos with insane pixelcounts, and you can explore them via a Google Maps-like interface. What’s neat is that people can take “snapshots” to hi-light things in the image, which you can skip through. It’s like “Where’s Waldo” for realsies.
Some awesome ones:
This proves that all those “enhance” scenes in CSI could totally happen in real life.
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EPiServer Trumps Competition, Decides to Go Public: This is neat to see. Not many pure CMS companies are public.
EPiServer is preparing to go public on the Stockholm Stock Exchange. Being one of the few in its Web CMS market segment to be public, this move gives the company a certain advantage.
For buyers, it is going to be easier to evaluate a public company, since all the financials will be out in the open. One might say that no one cares about that, but the reality shows a different picture. No one wants to indulge in guesswork when investing in a Web CMS product and vendor. As we know, this deal is just like marriage.
As soon as I can figure out how to buy something on the Stockholm exchange, I’ll invest.
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Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love: I really have to agree with this post. Too many people feel like the Internet is designed to be free, and there’s no expense associated with content development.
This is an impassioned plea for Ars Technica not to block their ads. It’s worth reading.
My argument is simple: blocking ads can be devastating to the sites you love. I am not making an argument that blocking ads is a form of stealing, or is immoral, or unethical, or makes someone the son of the devil. It can result in people losing their jobs, it can result in less content on any given site, and it definitely can affect the quality of content. It can also put sites into a real advertising death spin.
I wrote about this exact same thing a couple years ago: AdBlock Plus and the Future of Advertising:
Like it or not, advertising is the currency of media. Unless you want to pay for everything you watch, read, or hear, advertising is going to have to be somewhere.
Risking a really bad analogy, it’s like a terrorist movement, — if you successfully block its traditional methods, it will just come out in more subversive ways. It’s up to us which method we let stick — but one of them will have to stick, trust me.
Still true.
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