Integer Overflow

Noticing that my hard drive is making a disturbing amount of noise, I spent much of the day revising my backup policies.

I take my backup seriously.  I’ve got a lot of code that I’ve been working on over the years, and I would hate to lose it.  Still, I’m not a wealthy man, so I kinda do it on the cheap.  Here’s what my policy looks like:

I keep an account on rsync.net, which rents out storage on their servers in California.  I decided to go with offsite storage because I wanted a backup in case my house burns down, and I decided to go with rsync.net because the owner and I have a mutual friend.  Pretty basic decision making process.

I use duplicity to manage my backups.  Duplicity is a Python program that, through the magic of great bookkeeping, is able to do rsync style backups and keep the remote copies encrypted with GPG.  In other words, it only updates files that have changed, and the offsite copies are all encrypted.

My home directory has a subdirectory where I keep all of the stuff that needs to be backed up.  No lists to maintain; if it needs to be backed up, it’s in that place.   Pretty basic.