Winter’s Fall

After seeing Jeff Atwood’s recent data loss I had my own nightmare about losing data. Unfortunately for me it involved the loss of all of the photos I’ve taken since 2003. Plus a good deal of other stuff.

So, I set out today to solve my problem. I spent a good deal of time looking at the off-the-shelf products on the market. Every product seemed to have made some drawback that I wasn’t willing to accept. So, I finally caved and built a NAS system. The result is a system that serves all of my purposes and then some, while being energy conscious.

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I am a huge fan of DRY (don’t repeat yourself). It has the obvious perk of making code easier to read and comprehend. There are also other benefits that are less obvious.

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If you wouldn’t trust a carpenter who did know what was in his toolbox work on your house, why do you let developers who don’t know what tools they have work on your code?

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The last two weeks I have been on a bit of an adventure with AT&T attempting to get Uverse service and this is my story.

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I want to know why you might approach assigning “Longitude” to a CString using this method:

CString temp_str;
sprintf(temp_str.GetBuffer(), "%s", "Longitude");
temp_str.ReleaseBuffer();

So, I’ve been running down the list of features that I want in my system backup application. I’ve decided that this is the must implement feature list:

• Full system backup (i.e. support bare metal restore)
• Hourly backups of changed files (kept for 24 hours)
• Daily tag of changed files
• Weekly full system backups
• Backup at system shutdown
• Restore selected revision of a file

This system will have two components, the client component that performs the system backup. The second component is a server component. The server will most likely be implemented on a distribution of Linux (perhaps using Ubuntu server as a starting point). I will initially write a client for the Windows operating system (targeting XP first, and then extending with functionality provided by Vista and 7). Eventually a client will be developed that runs on Linux systems using LVM.

As a side note, there a few new tweaks to the blog thanks to playing with jQuery. A few more will be coming in the little while.

Work has been keeping me ridiculously busy lately, but I’m starting to formulate plans for my next side project. I think I am going to develop a volume shadow copy backup system. The system will be similar to TimeMachine but witha  few significant changes. I am working out the details. But, I’m going to employ Volume Shadow Copy Service to provide my consistent in place snapshots.

I’ve been slow at getting new photos uploaded for the last week. I’ve been fighting a bit of a deadline at work. The paper that I am working on with my boss at work is coming up and I’ve got to finish pounding out the data and code for it. So, that’s what I’m doing this weekend too. Hang in there, more photos to come this week. I promise.