Rubénerd!

I've been blogging for long enough to have suffered a couple of disastrous data losses, but only once have I irreversibly lost stuff. Consequently I backup my blogs daily, but on a hunch early this morning I decided to test my backups on a local installation of WordPress. I choked!

Every evening my server is configured with a couple of cron jobs to do these backups which then get the bzip2 treatment:

• An SQL query
• A WordPress RSS/WXR file
• A grilled cheese sandwich with avocado and gherkins

The SQL backup is fairly vanilla stuff, and always works, as one would expect. WordPress's automatically generated RSS/WXR files are much easier to work with, but from repeated painful experience over many years they're unreliable as heck. Perhaps I should phrase that to say "easier to work with... when they work"!

You're telling us this... why?

I belabor all this because when I tested the WXR files my server has been exporting lately, they don't include categories when you reimport them into vanilla WordPress installs. None. Nada. Zippo. This despite setting the PHP memory ceiling higher as I talked about before and splitting up the WXR files as recommended by various folks.

Despite being introduced years ago, WXR is still horribly broken. As far as I can tell from trudging through the source WordPress doesn't even use a XML parser when importing them. I suppose that's another reason why I don't use sites like WordPress.com, when things like this mess up I can always access the database directly, and why on smaller projects I use SQLite3 databases which you can cheat on and backup by just copying over one file! Ah and I'm nostalgic for sqlplus already ;).

What do you guys do for data backups for your online stuff?

So after hearing Scott Bourne rave about the Drobo intelligent redundant data backup system on MacBreak Weekly so many times I decided to finally look into it. Drobo doesn't sell machines outside the US or Canada but they do have links to foreign distributors, one of which is Streetwise Australia:

Drobo: The world's first storage robot. Fully automated storage you don’t have to manage.

Chances are, you get passionate about creating or collecting digital content, not about managing the storage where it lives. For you we’ve created Drobo, the first robotic storage device that takes the pain out of keeping your content safe.

AU $779

My data is extremely valuable to me, but even value must give in to economic realities. It may be an amazing device, but spending almost AU$800 on such a device when it doesn't even come with any drives is completely out of the question. I respect Scott Bourne, but that's not to say I can ever afford his recommendations.

AU $779 ???

Guess it's back to Rsync between my internal MacBook Pro and ThinkPad X40 drives and my Stonehenge of individual external hard drives each with their own power supply and data cables. Its a messy, seething mass of twisted electronics that takes up an entire tabletop and an almost two full powerboards, but it works.

The flustered rent and webhost episode!

Fun with dealing with broken corrupt backups, misleadingly labelled auto rent payments and my former webhost Servage now that I'm safely typing this from Segment Publishing!

Am particularly flustered and fast talking which saves on file download times for your convenience. Thank you.

Download MP3 to listen 20:55 9.7MiB

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