E-Scribe News : a programmer’s blog

About Me

PBX My name is Paul Bissex, and e-scribe.com is my consulting business. I build web applications using as much open source software as possible. From September to June I teach web design and other important non-photographic professional skills to photographers. In the '90s I wrote technology commentary and reviews for magazines, newspapers, and web publications, including Wired, Salon.com, FamilyPC, the late lamented Web Review, and the Chicago Tribune. Feel free to email me.

Book Project

I'm co-authoring a book, "Python Web Development with Django", with Jeff Forcier and Wesley Chun. It will be published by Prentice Hall in July 2008, but is available for pre-ordering on Amazon now.

Colophon

This site is built on a fresh trunk checkout of Django, running on Python 2.5.1, served by Apache and mod_python. The database is SQLite. The operating system is FreeBSD, on a VPS hosted at Johncompanies.com. Comment-spam protection by Akismet. Vintage topo imagery from the Maptech archive.

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Stuff I Use

Akismet, del.icio.us, Django, dpaste.com, Emacs, FreeBSD, Freenode, jQuery, LaunchBar, MacPorts, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, SQLite, Subversion, TextMate, Trac, Ubuntu Linux, wmii

A Django site.
(Finally!)

Copyright 2008
by Paul Bissex
and E-Scribe New Media

Offsite, online backup: rsync.net

This week at work we've been dealing with a hellish situation: our colocation provider (who will for now go unnamed) wiped out the live backup of one of our drives -- then overwrote the drive with a seven-day-old tape backup. Nice going, guys! So now I'm digging through my "stashed-this-away-just-in-case" backups for missing data from the past week.

We're switching to JohnCompanies.com for hosting -- I've been using them for nearly three years for my own stuff (including this site), quite happily.

As you might imagine, one goal in the switch is improving backup reliability. An important backup principle is that you actually be able to retrieve the stuff you back up -- preferably quickly and conveniently. I like mirror-style live backups; if you hose a file or directory, you can fetch a copy right from the backup filesystem. It's like having a "revert" command for your entire server.

JohnCompanies offers NFS-mounted backup on their dedicated boxes, but not on the VPS accounts. For various reasons (not primarily price) we were pretty firmly settled on the VPS, so this was a stumper. I exchanged some e-mail with Dave at JohnCompanies asking questions and explaining our goals.

This afternoon I had the pleasure of getting a phone call from the eponymous John, reminding me that a few months ago they launched rsync.net, a remote filesystem product that's exactly what we need. We can maintain a copy of our live server that's as granular and fresh as we want -- or multiple snapshots. And of course we can pull down local copies from the rsync.net server as well.

I'll try to post an update in a few weeks when we've set it up and tried it out.

Thursday, May 11th, 2006
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Some related posts: From PHP to Python • In-place import using Subversion • Notes on my new Django setup • If all else fails, force it • Handling legacy URLs with Django • Think twice before you let those domains lapse • Root, sweet root • Random crufty open source release of the day

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