About Me

PBX I'm Paul Bissex. I build web applications using open source software, especially Django. In the '90s I did graphic design for newspapers and magazines. Then I wrote technology commentary and reviews for Wired, Salon.com, Chicago Tribune, and lots of little places you've never heard of. Then I taught photographers how to create good websites. I co-wrote a book along the way. Now I am helping turn a giant media corporation into a digital enterprise. Feel free to email me.

Book

I'm co-author of "Python Web Development with Django", an excellent guide to my favorite web framework. Published by Addison-Wesley, it is available from Amazon and your favorite technical bookstore as well.

Colophon

Built using Django, served by Apache and mod_wsgi. 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. The markup engine is Markdown.

Pile o'Tags

Stuff I Use

Akismet, bitbucket, del.icio.us, Django, Emacs, FreeBSD, Git, jQuery, LaunchBar, Markdown, Mercurial, OS X, Postfix, Python, Review Board, S3, SQLite, TextMate, Ubuntu Linux

Spam Report

At least 185000 pieces of comment spam killed since January 2008, mostly via Akismet.

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
tips + web development
3 comments

• Comment from zoot , 3 years later

I see this is a very old post, but I'm interested in feedbank on rsync.net. If you're still subscribed to their service that will be telling :)

Thanks!

• Comment from Paul , 3 years later

zoot -- three years later, still using rsync.net happily. It's largely been a "set it and forget it" operation -- a nightly cronjob rsyncs the content we want to keep backed up. It has definitely saved my bacon a couple times.

• Comment from Patent Attorney NJ , 4 years later

I'm now switching from a very good but very commercial product to RSYNC.net ... no more windows client... backup directly from my fileserver and windows share. So nice.