Tuesday, November 28, 2006
Usual oatmeal breakfast. Student computing committee meeting. Staff meeting. Chatted with Frank M about the clin pharm website and intranet. Lunch at Cybelle's with Joel. Joel had a monster slice of hawaiian with a side salad with 1000 island. I had a cheddar burger on english muffin (it came that way) with home fries. Mailed two packages at the post office: one was Jeanne's cookies (airmail, about $30, takes about 5 or 6 days I think) and the other was my broken Pelican VersaBrite II flashlight which I had to return for replacement because the twist head was so sticky that the neck started bending and cracking. Chatted with Sue Abby about her html e-mail template. Helped Scott with something I can't remember now. Helped Lucia with a problem with legitimate messages going in to her Junk E-mail folder accidentally. Worked on the student database on the web project, made a lot of progress. I'm needing to convert code written in PEAR DB to PEAR MDB2. This abstraction really hasn't paid off for me because PEAR DB was deprecated so I had to rewrite my code anyhow. Fortunately, that part of this project is not the hard part—much of the code will remain the same. Renegade sent me an e-mail today commiserating with my Iomega woes of November 17. I believe that backing up data has actually gotten harder than it was 15 or 20 years ago because of the personal computer revolution. Before personal computers, backups were handled only by professionals who were paid money to pull and pop giant data cassettes on and off of mainframe spindles. You could pretty much bet that they knew what they were doing. With personal computers, backup tasks are the responsibility of people who do not have the patience for the decisionmaking that must take place in order to have a successful and reliable solution. Who can blame them? The learning curve to using tools like Retrospect Express or Iomega Automatic Backup Pro is still too high, in my opinion. In the past 2 years, I can't tell you how many computer users I have encountered who bought one of those one-button-backup external hard drives only to have no backed up data when they needed it. When they first came out, I thought they were great and recommended them myself. However, I must admit now that they are not a very good solution. The reasons vary because there are so many points of failure. Real life examples: I wasn't using it because I didn't know I could use it for backup. I kept getting these error messages, but I didn't know what they meant. I did a synch and suddenly the files I wanted were gone. Apple's Time Machine in the forthcoming OS X Leopard might have the right idea. The first time I heard about Time Machine, I wondered, "Okay, but how much disk space is that going to require?" Now, I'm thinking that that doesn't matter. Disk space is cheap and getting cheaper, and what's expensive is data loss or time lost attempting to figure out if you even have the data backed up so that it can be restored. Time Machine has a lot of what I require in backup: extreme simplicity, incrementality (progressiveness), scheduling. Apple's pre-release description makes it appear that you can back up to an OS X server or, presumably, any network drive available—this would make it ideal in an office setting. If it works, no more spending hundreds of dollars on Retrospect, and it appears to be simple enough that users can handle their own restore operations—no admin is required to do backups or restores! It remains to be seen if you can put 2 Macs on a home network and configure them to back each other up—that would be nice. What's missing from Time Machine that I'd like: encrypt and back up incrementally over the Internet to your friend's computer offsite. For example, I would be happy to purchase more hard drive space to offer friends of mine free backup services if they were willing to do the same for me. In the long run, I think this is less expensive than both of us paying for online storage services such as Amazon S3. Bonus if Time Machine were able to specify more than one mirror of your encrypted data. For example, we could have our data backed up in several locations which vary geographically so that if, say, California were to split in half, I could retrieve my data from our friends in Chicago or Paris. Even with slow upload speeds on asymmetric Internet connections, you generally speaking have time on your side and your data will probably be mirrored (backed up) before a failure occurs. (And you should be doing a local backup anyhow, too.) Wrapped Christmas presents. Late dinner at home by myself: vermicelli noodles, wontons, spinach, baby bok choy in chicken broth. Worked on Corinna's website.