Terse Systems

A little over a week ago, I made the appropriate sacrifices, made a backup to an external machine, setup a new computer (after figuring out why it wouldn’t POST with a USB keyboard plugged into it) and then transferred the hard drives of my old computer into the new one.

Long story short, the hard drive with all my important data died, and the backup contains some hairball that causes the backup server to freeze when the data is transferred. Oh, and my laptop died as well. The same day.

Ever get the feeling the ground has just crumbled under your feet?

I lost some stuff. Most annoyingly, I lost all my software registration keys. This is good in a way – it means I can try mint.com without having to worry about my old data. And I’ve found that I tend to use online services such as Google Docs and Google Bookmarks over any local solution, so in some cases there is no need to backup at all.

I spent most of the beginning of the week reinstalling my toolkit: Perl, Java, Ruby, RSIGuard, jEdit, etc. And making sure this can never happen again. I have everything local (and this server) backed up onto Amazon S3, using s3sync. I also have a weekly backup of the database onto S3, and I’ve already restored it to check it’s still good.

Of course, it’s going to take me three full days to upload my MP3s onto S3, but I think it’s going to be worth it. And eventually, iTunes will get smart enough that I’ll never need to download them again.