Tag Archives: Backup

Amazon Killed the Internet

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Tonight, these sites and perhaps hundreds more died. At least temporarily.

Amazon's AWS servers went down effectively disabling Netflix, Tumblr, Instagram, Woot, Pinterest, Skype, Zynga and more

The Internet was ablaze (almost ironically) tonight when a massive storm on the East Coast caused a power outage that affected Amazon’s “Amazon Web Services” cloud server system. AWS is what power so many sites and services these days. It’s their reliability, scalability, cost and speed that have so many startups jumping to their system.

Tonight became Survivor - Startup Edition

Tonight became Survivor – Startup Edition

However, tonight highlights what happens when you rely on a single fail point. What’s the adage? “You’re only as strong as your weakest link.” Well tonight it was a single Amazon server location’s power outage that has many of the most popular sites offline. Amazingly, Twitter is not one of the sites shutdown.

 

Once the power is back on, or once Amazon starts shifting bandwidth and syncing servers, all of these sites will be back up and running. What’s disappointing is that even though Amazon has tons of servers all over the country, it only took one power outage to cripple their system.  Continue reading →

How to Automatically Backup a WordPress Blog

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The other day I had a friend ask me for a best practice in backing up his self-hosted WordPress blog. At some point his blog crashed and he lost just about everything. This is no good, especially when backing up and restoring WordPress has become so easy!

I follow a rule of data security that no data is secure until it lives in three different locations. For my blog that looks like this.

  1. Original file on my computer
  2. Copy on my portable external drive
  3. Copy on Drobo as the archive

The fail here is that at any given moment, two or three of these might be in the same place. If I’m at home with my laptop, my portable hard drive and my Drobo, and my apartment blows up, I’m done for. Your third space should be someone in the Cloud or some other safe online backup location away from your other backups.

For my blog it is much easier. I use two plugins, WP-Database and UpDraft to do daily and weekly backups of my MySQL database and the actual files behind my blog. In addition, my host provides daily, weekly and monthly backups.

Here is my backup structure.

Most hosts will only backup your website files, not your database. They leave this up to you. But with a blog, all your most important content is probably the posts which live in the database! Let’s learn how to create a fail-proof* blog backup. Continue reading →

Stop the iPhone Backup Madness

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Thanks to Gizmodo for this one, here’s how you stop the backup process on your iPhone from ever happening.  Chances are you only will need to back up once-in-a-while.  I didn’t know I needed a backup for my phone in the first place!  Here are the steps to take.

1. – Quit iTunes.
2. – Open Terminal.app
3. – Copy and paste this in, then hit return:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool true
4. – Open iTunes
5. – Plug in your iPhone (2.0 or 3G) and sync.

It will take a few seconds, assuming you don’t have a ton of music or podcasts.

Changing the ‘true’ in step 3 to ‘false’ will re-enable the backup feature.

I’d probably recommend backing up once a week or each night while you sleep. With the new 2.0.1 firmware these problems are supposed to be fixed. Just switch False/True as needed and you can backup on your schedule.

It’s that easy.  Now you can sync and go!  No more watching the entire Dr. Horrible Sing-Along while you wait.

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I’m Sick and Tired of…

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Being sick and tired.

I went to urgent care today.  For about two weeks I’ve have been dealing with what I thought was a cold.  I got my flu shot this year so I wouldn’t have to worry about getting sick… Lull and behold, I have bronchitis.

Are you kidding me?  Ugh.  Luckily I caught it before it got too bad

So anyways, while I was waiting to get my four RX’s filled, I got a new aquarium for my goldfish with a nice filter and all that jazz.  The first aquarium I bought today had a leak so I had to return it.  I give major props to Columbia Pet Center.  They are incredibly knowledgeable about all things pet related and seem to care a great deal for their creatures, large and small.

The guy who helped me out there did a wonderful job of making me feel comfortable with my purchase of an aquarium (at $15 less than the other pet store) and power-wheel bio filter.  My goldfish is just loving his new space, ten times larger.

In a month they will test my water and let me know if I’m ready for any plants or other fish.  How professional.  PetCo or Pet’s Mart would sell me anything just to make a sell, never-mind the health of the fish.  Kevin brought me to this place a few years ago, thanks Kevin!

I also went to Best Buy to get yet another 1tb external hard drive.  I now have over 1.5tb of data on my iMac.  My external 1tb filled up with my iTunes library and Time Machine backups.  At first I had some trouble with my new drive but it seems to be working out just fine right now.  I have backed up my laptop and am currently moving the old Time Machine backups to the new drive.

It’s going to take a while…  Over 7 million files and counting?  I truly am a media whore.

UPDATE: I am now at over 10,000,000 files.  Holy crap.

UPDATE: It is still counting up after over seven hours and more than 29,000,000 files.  Something just isn’t right here.  There just can’t be that many Time Machine backups.