kplaylist access
I’ve recently installed the latest build of kplaylist and a flash streaming player. As a result (and due to carelessness on my part), all of my kplaylist users got lost. If anyone out there (including people who weren’t previously on my kplaylist user list) wants access to my kplaylist, drop me a line. Currently we have 17,265 tracks – I’m shooting for 20,000 by the end of the year.
November 7th, 2007 at 2:48 pm
hmm, my bedtime.bat calls backup-stuff.bat which zips up various files based on the machine’s name, including c:\program files\*.ini … which helps preserve settings / buddy lists (hmm maybe i should add xml in addition to ini since Trillian stores it’s buddy list in xml) …. And then that zip is copied to every computer of course! So, i’ve only used it twice in 2 years, but.. in the event of losing settings, i just re-install the program, then find the INI, unzip, and overwrite.
it’s probaby that easy in unix? (correct me if I’m wrong)
of course i know the cardinal rule of backups: nobody cares until it’s too late. [un]fortunately i’ve been burned too many times. Losing Eliza in 1987. Losing my dreams [literally] in 1997. Losing all my music’s organization and tagging in 2001 (still only 95% recovered, and it took like 3 years to get 60% recovered.. i had the MUSIC, but not the tags/organization). Losing a few other drives that I fortunately managed to recover the data off, even though windows thought they were blank.
I guess… i have to lose a lot before i worry about losing more. If only I had 20/20 foresight. If only we all did.
I’m finding your blog strangely interesting, btw.
November 7th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
I could have restored the userlist from a mysql backup – I’m just too lazy. Among other things, this helps me prune out the old users who weren’t using it any more and gives me a excuse to open a invite to new users who otherwise wouldn’t even know that I maintained a kplaylist server.
I have automated backups of peterbilt, the server with all the music on it, that run once a month. That’s the machine I mentioned with 1.4T of misc stuff on it. I should run database backups every day – I run database backups of several other systems daily, but I had forgotten that pb’s mysql database even had anything worth saving in it.
I don’t have automated backups of any of my windows machines.. in my experience, the most useful backup for a windows machine that uses the registry is a disk image, and I haven’t yet spent the time to figure out a good way to do that. I manually back them up by booting from a linux CD and then running netcat. Tacky, I know.
As far as my blog being interesting, insanity often is 😉
November 7th, 2007 at 3:30 pm
Actually, I think I’ve got a problem with paranoia.. I can’t smoke weed in social situations because I become convinced that I’m ruining everyone else’s good time and/or saying incredibly stupid things. Actually, even without the weed I’m often convinced of that. Fear is probably the #1 motivator in my life.. which is why I haven’t (yet) had a major data disaster.. I still have the backups of Rising Of The Dark Star – as well as the complete contents of my Amiga 2000’s disk. Sadly, I don’t have my Vic-20 tapes or my C-128 disks with the writings of my youth prior to the 8088/68000 age, but, really, that’s probably not any big loss to the world 😉 And, strangely, I can’t seem to find copies of any of the early porn I wrote for usenet in my teen years. [I’m a bad dog – I am a bad dog – I’ve been a bad dog – I’ve been a bad dog – shame, on, shame, on, shame on me….] .. and that is *definately* not something that the world really needs to have around so I’m not really that worried about it – Kayti wants to read it, though.
Actually, I guess I’ve lost a lot of data from my early years.. I lost a bunch of removable media cartridges because they ceased being readable, as well – of course, they mostly contained captures from usenet as well.
November 7th, 2007 at 3:31 pm
Grr. I hate it when I do that.. (double ‘as well’ in the last paragraph)
November 7th, 2007 at 5:14 pm
a full disk image might be considered wasteful though, considering the smallest harddrive in MY two machines is 150G (the only one I didn’t choose… all others are 400 or 750). And it’s huge. And doing incremental backups seems problematic. I’d almost say go with RAID at that point (tho I am personally anti-RAID for my own personal computing).
i figure i’ll just re-install windows, re-install programs, but i want my DATA backed up, that is what is most important. i don’t want holding out for a perfect backup solution to keep me from doing diligent backups now, because i know no matter what happens, i will be a little fucked if a hd crashes heheh
i have backup.bat which copies a file to c:\backup on every machine, then backup-stuff.bat which makes a huge zip of all the important stuff on that machine (and runs backup.bat on it), backup-to-dvds which RARs data with 8 percent parity into quarter-size dvd chunks (prompting for compressoin level in case i want it to go faster), and karen’s replicator for copying repositories (r:\mp3, w:\wwwpics, L:\install-files, etc) onto 2 differnet machines (part of bedtime.bat).
it’s such a totally piecemeal solution!! 🙂
oh, and we burn everything twice, which has saved us multiple times when crap gets scratched..
November 7th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
ironically the ONLY backup of my BBS as http://www.acm.vt.edu/~clint/hell , as i had a 4G crash in 1997 or so that i was NOT prepared for. lost my dreams, as well as a very thorough log of my college….. we’ll say, “experiences”. [And I’m not talking about sex.] I’d pay $100 for that file. All I have now is 1G of deleted harddrive sectors (I had moved all my data to the 4G prior to crash, so the harddrives had a lot of it in the deleted area. that’s when i learned: COPY DON’T MOVE. DON’T TRUST NEW DRIVES. NEW DRIVES DO BACKUPS ONLY FOR AS LONG AS PRACTICAL)
I’d LOVE a way to convert my Apple2+ disks to the disk image files that the generic apple2 emulator I have uses. WOULD LOVE IT.
But I have managed to recover a lot of super-old data .. some of my BAT files in c:\bat\ are from the late 1980s, though most of that is in c:\bat\osbolete (I really can’t delete!!; even the obsolete folder is repliated onto every computer)
too bad about the porn. i used to put stuff in c:\pub\ when it was stuff i CREATED, kind of following the ‘pub’ idea with old ftp sites and such. suffice to say, now there’s pub\finance pub\job\job#_jobname\ and all kinds of stuff, and it’s one of those folders that gets backed up with backup-stuff.bat, and is multiple gigs now… but that’s where i can sometimes find very old stuff. and r:\txt\ANSI of course
i assume you’ve been to bbsmates.com
November 7th, 2007 at 5:20 pm
Oh, and about the fear. That sucks. That’s actually more anxiety than fear to me. Not much can really be done if that’s how you are. Take X maybe? I dunno 🙂
November 7th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Part of what I hate losing when I lose a disk on a windows PC, though, is all those little things that aren’t data, exactly, and aren’t programs, exactly.. like the perfect setup of macros in SoundForge.. DIsk space is very cheap, my time isn’t – it’s true that disk space is a finite resource, but it’s a very *large* finite resource, and two hours of my time trade for one terabyte of disk space. It can take me *days* – at least two – to restore a development workstation to 100% ‘perfect’. So a image backup looks like a pretty good investment. 😉
November 7th, 2007 at 7:52 pm
Fair enough.. But those macros are stored in a file that could be easily backed up! 🙂