The IT Blog

Tag: Backup

  • Backup your Crontab …

    Yesterday evening I just quickly wanted to change something in my crontab .. I was tired, I was distracted, I just SSH’ed into my machine and typed crontab -r.

    Ahh typo! I obviously wanted to crontab -e which is just ONE key away from -r. But … no error, no “unknown option”? This left me in a “eh what is -r and why is crontab -l empty?” – and I sensed a little disaster …

    A quick check with man crontab confirmed my discovery:

           -r     Removes the current crontab.

    Oh man. I never thought about backing up my crontab! Until yesterday. Now I have a fresh crontab and new line in in it, too:

    crontab -l > crontab.bak && git commit -am "auto commit" && git push

    Luckily there wasn’t TOO much in my crontab, but still, this was an anoying experience. Maybe there are smarter ways to backup scripts in my home directory – but it’s okay for now.

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  • Your Backup Plan Is Incomplete Without Restore Tests

    Backups should be routine not only for folks in the IT. If you’re reading this you probably already have SOME backup process in place. Ideally automatically or with a scheduled reminder.

    But doing backups regularly is just half the story …

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  • Ever Wondered What Would Happen If You Lost Your Account?

    Paris Buttfield-Addison, a developer and long-time Apple user, recently lost permanent access to his Apple ID. And he didn’t even do anything wrong. The result: 20 years of photos, messages and data? Gone. A true worst case scenario! But let’s have a look, should we learn something from that?

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  • How to make space/storage efficient backups of Raspberry Pi SD-cards

    RaspberryPi mini computers are great for all kinds of home automation, media centers, home servers. Yet it should be known that the draw back for permanent operation can be the SD-card. Especially when applications on the RasperrbyPi cause excessive read/writes or if it is used outsides where temperatures can reach the SD-Card operating limits, IO errors should be expected that can just f* up the operating system.

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