Backup Regime

I've updated how my backup regime works and I wanted to write it all down to make sure that it is clear in my head. The overview is to make sure that I have two copies of all media as quickly as possible and then move a third backup into the cloud. I use about 1 gig of new disk space each month, mostly from pictures and videos. The steps to get this backed up are:

1. Put the source media, SD cards, into read only mode
2. Copy the media into a new folder under a single 'media' folder on my desktop with the name of the folder being the date when I'm doing the backup
3. Immediately copy the new folder onto an external USB hard drive
4. Remove the hard drive from the desk top
5. Kick off a backup. I'm using Jungle Disk for my cloud backups
6. Put the SD card into read-write mode and delete all content to free up space
7. That's it

I'm going to use the OVI files space I have for syncing docs between computers for the time being.

Giving up on Google Wave

I've been playing with Google Wave for just over a week now and I think I've seen enough. I just can't find anything practical for it to do. I feels very much like a technology searching for a problem to solve. It reminds me very much of Joel Spolsky's post on Architect Astronauts.

Robert Scoble, who I don't actually follow, has a nice post pointing out that Wiki's would be a better solution to many Google Wave's supposed use cases.

Feel free to tell me I'm wrong. I'll try to keep an open mind.

Speeding up Webpage with YSlow

I help my sister-in-law by looking after the hosting of the web site for their company 'Out and About'. After they recently updated their content I decided to have a play with Yahoo's YSlow Firefox extension to make sure I'd got everything running as smoothly as I could. There were several server related issues that I fixed quite easily. I had most problems sorting out the expires headers on the static content. I run the lighttpd webserver to host the site. In order to get the expires header I had to enable mod_expire and make sure it was the first module listed. The in the web page virtual host entry I added: expire.url = ("" => "access 1 months") ...this is to put a long expires header for the whole site contents as it is all static. With this in place YSlow scores me an "A". The initial page load takes about 4s and subsequent navigations take about 75ms while the Google Analytics component loads.