Things I have learnt this week.

• Backups are good.
  • If for instance your colo box breaks.
• Tested backups are better.
  • Best to test them before your box breaks.
• Automated backups are better still.
  • Humans forget to do things. Machines rarely do. So your backup may not be as recent as yo u think.
• How to backup svn
  • svnadmin dump $repo | bzip2 > svndump.bz2
• Checking which disk you are replacing in a degraded mirrored pair is a good thing
  • Your filesystem dieing or going back in time is not fun. See previous points

Having learnt these things I have made my backup regime better and have made sure its croned and does backup the stuff I need. I s hould also start putting more stuff in my svn repo.

This clusterfuck did annoyingly lead to losing about a weeks worth of data on the Randomness Guide to London which was particularly galling since one of the reason for doing it was I trusted myself more with the data. bah

I've had a svn repo for a while. Today I installed SVN::Web which gives a useful web interface to it. For example you can see other revisions than the current one. My Repository via SVN::Web.

One reason why i did this is that it gives a RSS feed of the revision log. This means I can use RSS FWD to get commit messages in my email without having to mess with commit hooks.