Mozilla Weave

This is a short blog post to say that I’ve found an excellent must-have for Firefox users. It’s called Mozilla Weave. It keeps history, bookmarks, passwords, Firefox settings, and soon add-ons in sync. My experience of any kind of automated syncing software has been poor, but this one seems to be flawless. Minus connectivity issues [...]

Backing up with Duplicity, Effortlessly

Duplicity has a wonderful design feature: it’s really really simple. Duplicity has an annoying design flaw: it’s really really simple. In case you didn’t notice, Duplicity‘s simplicity is both helpful and inefficient. It’s extremely easy to start using Duplicity because its usage is so very simple. Want to back something up? Just write “duplicity /some/directory [...]

The Secret to Backing up Home Folders

Here are the things I do to keep my home folder backups to 2 GB or less: Clear Firefox’s cache. This is a big space hog, and cache is worthless. I filter out “.azureus/torrents/”, a folder of mine, so that any BitTorrent downloads aren’t included in my backups. They usually are demos of games I [...]

Backup Test: Reinstalling Gentoo

A good administrator always checks his backups by running through a make-believe full-scale recovery. I’m doing that right now. So far I’ve discovered some flaws in my backup process that thankfully I’ve discovered now. Things like when it recovers symlinked directories, which my backup software faithfully preserves, they don’t always point to an existent spot [...]

Duplicity Backs Up Beautifully (And Anywhere)

After struggling with what good backup system would work for me, I’ve finally settled on duplicity. It doesn’t have a user interface, and it doesn’t even use cron (though you can manually punch it in). It does, however, do exactly what I want: It can tell me what my system looked like at a particular [...]

One Down, One to Go

I am officially re-settled into Ubuntu again! I had to drop Kopete due to an annoying crash when I tried to log into certain protocols, so I use Gai… I mean… Pidgin instead. I seem to be running in circles – this is the second time I’ve switched back from Kopete. On the side, I [...]

Gettin’ Gentoo’s Gutsy

I’ve decided to try to step up another level in the Linux world. It’s time I tried Gentoo. Gentoo’s where all the cool documentation and HOWTO’s come from. Half the time they get things to work that others struggle with, and then share that knowledge. It’s almost like Gentoo is an excellent high-quality college that’s [...]