Extra Pepperoni

I do not have a comprehensive backup strategy. I keep reading well-reasoned arguments for at least 3 complete (bootable) backups, scratching my head, and saying, “Yeah, if I had a couple thousand unused, I could do that.” Yes, I know drives are cheap, but I have 3 important systems to back up, and 4 more where perhaps a dozen files matter combined. Between the important systems, I’d need about 600gb usable, and Joe thinks you need 3 bootable backups, and I’m a strong believer in keeping the backups permanently away from the originals (not on a rotating cycle, but never-the-twain-shall-meet time — what else is broadband for?).

http://www.takecontrolbooks.com/backup-macosx.html

Unfortunately, whenever I kick off an rsync job to update my remote backups (one set, not 3), Amy complains every day because Internet access is so slow. I think I have throttled it back enough to be unintrusive, but I just don’t remember, and (especially at an unobtrusive fraction of our 384kbps DSL uplink), it just takes so dang long.

http://rsync.samba.org/

But I’m not too worried, because 95%+ of my important data is in Eudora on my iPod (yes, I know iPods die — I’ve killed more than my fair share, along with Zip disks, Orb disks, and even a 2.5″ FireWire drive), and I use Synchronize Plus X to back up my iPod to my primary home and work machines automatically, every time I plug it in. This is a great feature of Synchronize, which mitigates my annoyance with their licensing.

Every morning when I get to work, I dock the iPod; Synchronize sees it, launches Eudora, backs up changed files to my work desktop’s hard disk, and launches an AppleScript to bring up a couple applications. When I’m done, I type eject in a Terminal window, my iPod unmounts, and login.keychain is locked (flushing ssh keys in the process). On my home PowerBook, the process is the same.

So I know my backup system works well, because I test restores whenever there’s a problem with the iPod (perhaps twice a year). But I still feel nervous erasing it before sending it away. I actually did this today — a couple months after its 2-year anniversary, my 60gb iPod photo’s battery won’t last an hour. Apple told me they’d fix it under extended AppleCare, but changed their minds and cancelled the repair — without telling me. I paid the $70 and sent it in today; I’m running off our old 10gb iPod in the interim.

For the next step, I’m moving my website into Subversion. I already keep Julia’s school site & Bjorn’s site & documentation in Subversion, and last week I got sick of making manual backups of a piece I’m writing for TidBITS, so I reorganized and checked in my writing (not that there’s much of it). Tonight, I threw out 4gb of my 7gb ~/public_html in preparation for checking in (most of) the rest of it.

• http://subversion.tigris.org/
• http://www.brooklynfreespace.org/
• http://www.xowave.com/

Backing up a Subversion repository is easy, and will bring me to about 99% of important data backed up (not counting MP3s — are already replicated to 2 Macs & an iPod — or iPhoto libraries, which require different handling, but should back up quite well via rsync; but I have to get Julia’s few [important] pages into Subversion too).

I use vi daily, but much prefer BBEdit. The way I integrate them has evolved over time (see previous posts here, Useful subversion shell aliases, and BBEdit Gems (which appears to be down right now). In particular, I no longer configure BBEdit directly in ~/.subversion/config.

The new improved integration uses BBEdit whenever it’s available (I’m in front of the Mac), and falls back to the default (vi) when I’m connected via ssh.

First, I created ~/bin/edit.sh to hand off to BBEdit. I use edit.sh whenever BBEdit is appropriate:

#!/bin/sh
# Edit in BBEdit, for programs that don't support arguments in $EDITOR.
bbedit --wait --resume "$@"

Next, I configured my bash profile to prefer edit.sh when I’m not connected via ssh (which means when I am in front of the Mac or using ARD/VNC), as my EDITOR and PAGER. My profile doesn’t automatically determine whether to use bbdiff for Subversion, because I sometimes find it necessary to use non-BBEdit diff for Subversion (there are cases where the svn-to-bbedit handoff doesn’t work well, and I have ended up editing scratch files instead of the real files, for instance). Here’s the snippet that does this, from my profile:

if [[ ! $SSH_TTY ]]
then
  if [ -x ~/bin/edit.sh ]
    then
      export EDITOR=~/bin/edit.sh
    else export EDITOR=vi
  fi
  if [ -x /usr/bin/bbedit ]
    then export PAGER="col -b | bbedit --clean --view-top"
  fi
else export EDITOR=vi
fi # [[ ! $SSH_TTY ]]

In addition, I set up aliases for reviewing output from the svn command, based on Bob’s suggestions. I just copy and paste one or more lines from svn output to review changes in BBEdit:

alias  A='bbedit --wait'
alias AM='bbedit --wait'
alias  C='bbedit --wait'
alias  D='true'
alias  G='svn diff --diff-cmd bbdiff --extensions "--resume --wait"'
alias  I='true'
alias  M='svn diff --diff-cmd bbdiff --extensions "--resume --wait"'
alias  R='svn diff --diff-cmd bbdiff --extensions "--resume --wait"'
alias  U='bbedit --wait'

I update and then review status so often that I built my own TLA:

alias sus='svn update && svn status'

The following two commands provide “Subversion diff, with BBEdit” and “Subversion diff, no BBEdit”:

alias sdbb='svn diff --diff-cmd bbdiff --extensions "--resume --wait"'
alias sdnb='svn diff --diff-cmd diff -x -u'

When I’m way behind and have a lot of changes to review, I use a one-off command to review all the changes since I fell out of step. I also scan the email log messages, but this catches all the changes, skipping intermediate versions which have already been replaced and consolidating multiple edits to the same file. The command is something like:

svn diff --diff-cmd bbdiff --extensions "--resume --wait" -r1039

PS-I get the Subversion client with “fink install svn-client-ssl“.

BBEdit and Subversion now play well together (actually it’s since BBEdit 8.1, but I hadn’t noticed at the time). I added a few lines to ~/.subversion/config:

[helpers]
diff-cmd = bbdiff
extensions = --wait --resume

Now “svn diff” (with or without arguments) does the right thing.

Update: svn honors $EDITOR.