Tag Archives: backup

Ada Lovelace Day and Backup Awareness Day: Today!

Posted on 24.03.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Aujourd'hui, c'est à la fois Ada Lovelace Day et Backup Awareness Day. Je vous demanderai donc, fidèles lecteurs munis d'un blog ou d'un autre espace de publication, de bien vouloir prendre un petit moment pour écrire deux articles aujourd'hui.

Ils n'ont pas besoin d'être très longs, ou parfaits -- l'essentiel c'est de participer!

Je vous remercie mille fois d'avance de prendre part à ces deux opérations, et d'aider à faire passer le mot, via Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, la messagerie instantanée et même le bon vieil e-mail. Les hashtags pour Twitter sont #ALD10 et #backupday.

[en]

Completely accidentally, Backup Awareness Day collides with Ada Lovelace Day in March. And it’s today, March 24th.

So, I’m going to ask you (yes you, faithful readers!) — if you have a blog — to write two blog posts today, as I will. They don’t have to be long. They don’t have to be perfect. L’essentiel, c’est de participer — taking part is more important than performance.

I would also be very grateful if you took a few minutes to spread awareness about these two events amongst your friends and network. Post a link on Facebook or Tumblr, tweet about it (hashtags are #ALD10 and #backupday), send an e-mail or two, mention them to your IM buddies.

Thanks a lot for taking part and helping spread the word.

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Posted in Does This Need a New Category?, My projects | Tagged ada lovelace day, ALD, ald10, backup, backup awareness day, backupday, BAD, blogging, science, Technology, women | 1 Comment

A Year Ago: Backup Awareness Day

Posted on 24.02.2010 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Aujourd'hui, c'est Backup Awareness Day (quelqu'un a une traduction élégante à proposer? La journée mondiale des sauvegardes?) -- un jour par mois, le 24, pour faire ses sauvegardes si l'on est un peu laxe sur la question, et de façon générale rendre les gens conscients de l'importance de cette démarche. Il y a un an, en effet, suite à une fausse manipulation, j'ai effacé tout mon blog. Il m'a fallu deux mois pour le remettre en ligne en entier, ce qui aurait été bien plus simple si j'avais eu une sauvegarde à jour.

Le 24 de chaque mois, donc, c'est l'occasion d'écrire un article sur vos blogs pour rappeler à vos lecteurs de faire leurs sauvegardes, et leur donner des trucs pratiques pour le faire bien. Est-ce que je peux compter sur vous?

[en]

A year ago today, I hit the wrong “drop” button in PhpMyAdmin and completely deleted my blog. I couldn’t remember when I had last made a backup.

I’ll cut the long story of recovery short, but it took me nearly two months to get all my data back in place. I could have saved myself a lot of pain and worry and extra work if I had had an up-to-date backup of my blog.

I’ve always been sloppy with backups. Most people who are not IT professionals (and even them) are sometimes even sloppier still. We all know we should make backups more often, but we still live in the hope that we will not die theft, hard drive failures, and dropped databases will not happen to us. Oh yes, we know we’re wrong, but we’ve been lucky so far, haven’t we? Now shoo away those guilty feelings and get on with your life.

Well, no. I decided to make the 24th of every month Backup Awareness Day. A day to

  • blog about the importance of backups
  • give practical tips to actually do them
  • help people around you do backups
  • tell horror stories of lost data
  • do your own backups!
  • put in place automated systems.

You get the idea. A day a month to think about backups, do something about them, and raise awareness in your communities.

Unfortunately, I guess I had too much going on at the time, and I didn’t really follow through (I tweeted a bit, and blogged about it in June, but honestly, these last six months haven’t been very backup-aware).

So, this year, let’s make Backup Awareness Day a real part of our lives. I need your help for that. On the 24th of each month, even if I forget (I’ll try not to, promise!), tweet about it, blog about it, do your backups, and encourage those around you to do so too. Online, and offline. Can I count you in?

I’ve just hit that “Export” button in WordPress, saved a dump of my MySQL database, and plugged in the external hard drive so that Time Machine could have a go at it. You too — do these things now if that’s how you back up your important data, or do whatever you do to make sure your words, photographs, videos, and precious files do not evaporate in the event of a disaster.

I’m now going to mark Backup Awareness Day in my calendar for the coming months. (Of course, next month, Backup Awareness Day coincides with Ada Lovelace Day, which I’ll be telling you more about in a second later today.)

Update: Backup Awareness Day now has its own website at backupawareness.org! I’m going to need help with it, so let me know if you’d be ready to give a hand.

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Posted in My projects, Technology | Tagged backup, backup awareness day, BAD, data | 4 Comments

Today: Backup Awareness Day!

Posted on 24.06.2009 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Aujourd'hui, comme le 24 de chaque mois, journée des sauvegardes. Faites les vôtres!

[en]

I haven’t done as much as I wanted around Backup Awareness Day yet (and even skipped last month because I was in the mountains at that time), but it will come during the next months.

Backup Awareness Day takes place on the 24th of each month and is the occasion to:

  • do your backups and set up automatic systems to keep your data safe
  • help and encourage others to do so by helping them and blogging about the importance of backups and backup techniques.

If like me you’re having a busy week (busy but good), at least take the time today to:

  • plug in that external hard drive and make sure Time Machine does a backup
  • export your WordPress blog
  • dump your MySQL database
  • if all else fails or is too complicated for you, copy your most precious document folders onto a thumb drive or an external hard drive.

More next month!

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Posted in My projects, Technology | Tagged backup, backup awareness day, BAD, data, Events, security | 3 Comments

Today is Backup Awareness Day!

Posted on 24.04.2009 by Stephanie Booth

[fr]

Il y a deux mois, le 24 février, j'ai appuyé sur la mauvais bouton et effacé mon blog. Je ne savais pas de quand datait ma dernière sauvegarde.

Tout est bien qui finit bien pour moi (mais ça n'a pas été sans mal). Du coup, histoire d'encourager ceux qui, comme moi, sont un peu "mous de la sauvegarde", j'ai décrété que le 24 de chaque mois serait "Backup Awareness Day", ou "Journée de sensibilisation à la sauvegarde" (c'est mieux en Anglais, vous trouvez pas?)

Aujourd'hui, donc, on s'arrête un moment pour faire ces sauvegardes dont on aurait dû s'occuper depuis longtemps. On rebranche Time Machine. On va dans WordPress > Outils > Exporter. On fait un dump SQL de sa base de données. On met une copie des fichiers super importants sur lesquels on travaille depuis des semaines et qui n'existent que sur son ordinateur sur une clé USB. On motive ses voisins à faire de même. On écrit un article sur son blog pour rappeler à ses lecteurs de faire des sauvegardes. On met en place des systèmes automatisés, et l'on aide les autres à le faire.

Faire des sauvegardes une fois par mois, ce n'est pas suffisant. Mais c'est mieux que rien. Avec Backup Awareness Day, une fois par mois, prenons le temps de rappeler au monde que c'est important. Participez et taguez vos articles "backupawarenessday"!

[en]

Two months ago, on February 24th, I hit the wrong “Drop” button in PhpMyAdmin, resulting in the immediate deletion of the blog you’re reading. I didn’t know when I had last backed it up.

The story ends well, though it cost me (and others) many hours (days, actually) of work to get the whole of Climb to the Stars back online again.

I’ve always been careless about backups. Like many of you, probably. We can afford to be careless because accidents don’t happen very often, and as with Black Swans, we are under the mistaken belief that having been safe in the past will keep us safe in the future. Not so. As I like to repeat, the first time a disaster happens, well, it had never happened till then.

So, I’ve decided to declare the 24th of each month “Backup Awareness Day”. Here’s what it’s about:

  • Back up your files.
  • Back up your website.
  • Blog about the importance of backing up (sharing tips, stories, advice).
  • Tell your friends to back up.
  • Help your friends back up.
  • Put in place automatic backup systems.

Bottom-line: decrease the number of people who never back up, or back up so infrequently they’ll be in a real mess if things go wrong.

Now, perfectionism is the biggest enemy to getting things done. Backup Awareness Day does not mean that you have to do all this. Here are a few ideas to get your started (better a bad backup than no backup at all):

  • If Time Machine (or any other regular backup system you use for your computer) has been telling you it hasn’t done a backup in ages, stop what you’re doing right now and plug it in.
  • If you use WordPress, when was the last time you went to Tools > Export to make a quick backup? It’s not the best way to do it, but in my case, it saved CTTS.
  • Do you use something like Mozy to have a remote backup of your most important files? Time to sign up, maybe.
  • Are you working on important documents that exist only on your computer, which is never backed up? At the minimum, pick up a thumb drive and copy them onto it — or send yourself an e-mail with the files as attachment, if your e-mail is stored outside your computer (Gmail, for example).
  • Do you have an automatic backup set up for your database or website? Set some time aside on Backup Awareness Day to figure out cron.
  • When did you make the last dump of your MySQL database? Head over to PhpMyAdmin, or the command line (it’s mysqldump --opt -u user -p databasename > my-dirty-backup.sql)
  • Do you have the backup thing all figured out? Write a post for your readers with a few tips or tutorials to help them along. (Tag your posts “backupawarenessday” — I thought about “BAD” but that wasn’t really optimal ;-) )

I’m hoping to develop the concept more over the coming months. If you have ideas, get in touch, and take note of Backup Awareness Day for the month of May: Sunday 24th!

(Now stop reading and go do a few backups.)

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Posted in Wordpress | Tagged accident, backing up, backup, backupawarenessday, black swan, computer, ctts, data, Events, mozy, mysql, security, time machine, website, Wordpress | 12 Comments