Backups are good

Since my backup strategy of throw a tarfile somewhere and pray didn’t work out so well after the TiBook died, I decided it was time to look into something more, um, proper. I discovered that rdiff-backup could do almost exactly what I wanted (nightly backups of most of my homedir onto my local LInux server with incrementals), without all the mess that is trying to do incremental backups with tar. And it supports saving resource forks from OS X, even when the backup machine doesn’t (like, say, my Linux server). Woo! I’m using a combination of rdiff-backup for most of my homedir and Unison for directories like Music that I want synchronized between multiple machines (laptop, linux desktop, and workstation at the lab). Everything happens by cron script, so it should be mostly foolproof. I also made the backup target on the Linux server it’s own LVM partition so that I can remount it read-only as soon as I know I’m going to need to restore from it, avoiding the rm -rf issues that screwed me this time.

Apartment streams

Should you happen to end up in our apartment, you can now stream the giant repository of mp3s from mori (the local linux server) via either iTunes or the TiVo. Yeah for mt-daapd and JavaHMO. Oh, and the printer is now also broadcast as existing by CUPS, so my PowerBook “just finds it”. woot! Unfortunately, Red Hat has this really lame thing with their printer setup where the Info field is set to some magic string that can’t be changed and doesn’t help ID the printer. Which really sucks, as that’s what OS X shows in it’s printer selection box. I think I might disable the autodetection crap in RHAS, setup CUPS’ printers.conf on my own, and set the Info field to something useful. I find this weird, since Fedora Core 1 got it right. Sigh.