Gang, can you believe it’s only a week until Christmas? That must mean it’s Rob B’s birthday! Happy birthday dude.

i got my first present of the season yesterday, a much-needed new wallet from Kristian, Charlotte, and James. It’s very dapper and I look quite sophisticated now. Thanks much!

I’ve been thinking, lately, about backups, and that’s the subject of today’s ramblings.

Let’s all agree that backups are vital, especially as we move more and more into a paperless society. Business documents, photos, music collections - it’s all becoming little more that 0s and 1s arranged on a disk. Hard drive failure, in particular, is appallingly common, and people persist with little or no backup solution.

To my way of thinking, there are two kinds of backups: an “image” backup solution, in which a snapshot of an entire drive or partition is written to an “image” file; or a file backup solution, in which important individual files are copied to a backup location. An image takes up a lot of disk space, and is pretty slow, but is complete. Norton Ghost is one image solution, but requires the user to reboot the machine for a backup to occus, wheras Paragon Drive Backup does not, so is better for most applications, imo.

Then, when it comes to the file backup, things are even more complicated. Windows 2000/XP comes with backup software already, such as it is, but I recommend JAM Software’s SmartBackup, because it has better features and more options available. However, researching more into a side-issue I have with SmartBackup, I discovered that while it can compresses your backup files into an archive, once the archive is too big, you often can’t open it, which makes it therefore useless. A ha! That’s why Dad’s backups have been erroring.

To backup to hard drive, you need a big destination drive. Preferably dedicated purely to serving backups. And that’s when I had a few more ideas. Bare minimum is a seperate drive in the same machine. But that’s moderately risky: fire, for example, will destroy your original AND your backup; if the OS interacts with your backup drive, it can get infected with viruses etc. A better solution is to have the drive located in another machine, but who can afford another machine purely for backups? Noone, which is why NAS (Network Attached Storage) is such a great idea. For $146.70 (at Price Point, of course) you can get an appliance, which when installed with a hard-drive becomes a dedicated file-serving solution, ideal for backups. You’re still prone to the reduced risk of two drives failing at the same time, but for $447.70, Thecus have a RAID-1 NAS device, which provides two mirrored drives in one appliance to negate this risk in favour of a much less likely 3-disk failure.

If you write your own “backup software” - a scheduled task that copies your data directory to “data2″ or something, you might also enjoy this little piece of code:

@Echo OFF
IF EXIST %1 (
FOR %%V IN (%1) DO FOR /F “tokens=1-5 delims=/: ” %%J IN (”%%~tV”) DO Rename “%%V” %%L%%K%%J%%~xV ) ELSE (echo “Nothing to rename”)

which I call “datetime.cmd”. You add another scheduled task that runs “datetime.cmd data2″ and it’ll rename data2 to the more useful yyyymmdd format.

Dudes,

Secret santa details have been sent. Let me know if you don’t receive it.

Ok, here it is, a flash of brilliance encountered never before on these pages.

Group Christmas Party @ Conrad Jupiter’s, on the Gold Coast
this Sunday, 10th December

I have a poker tournament that weekend, and this is the perfect opportunity to whip up an event. Here’s the plan, not at all set in stone, but just an idea:

If there’s enough interest, I will hire a bus. This probably won’t need to happen, it’s just a numbers thing, but let’s say it does. Bus leaves Brisbane Sunday morning, dumping attendees at an agreed upon location
I need to register for my poker tournament at 11am, so I will go and do that.
We all meet up shortly after 11am at Food Fantasy @ the casino, for their $22.50 brunch buffet.
I have a room at Jupiter’s booked, so that people can change/wash before/after visits to the beach, or lay about groaning after lunch, or use the pool at Jupiter’s, walk around in a fluffy robe, whatever.
My poker tournament starts at 1pm, and I’ll play that until I get out. People are welcome to come and watch if they want. (note: fully acknowledge this will have more appeal to some than others …)
I’ll then come back to join people in more merriment.
Head home when the fun’s all done, or the kids are too tired to make it fun anymore, whichever comes first.

Also, there’ll be SECRET SANTA!!! I need numbers for that ASAP please, so I can organize it. Minimum and suggested maximum on the gift is $10.

c’mon folks, it’ll be awesome. RSVP already.