According to Backblaze, June is Backup Awareness Month, so my timing on this post is superb. Everyone who uses a computer knows (or should know) they’re supposed to be making regular backups of their precious data, yet hardly anyone actually does make regular backups. I don’t mean to brag, but I’m way past that. I’ve been kicking around a few ideas on backups for quite some time now, and I think I’ve finally got a decent solution worked out.

I’m posting my thoughts here in an attempt to get some feedback, and also for anyone else who’s in the same boat and might end up finding this later on. The technical implementation will focus mostly on Macs, since that’s what my wife and I use. You could extrapolate from this article and apply the same techniques to nearly any OS, though. I’ll have a Linux box (or two) in the mix as well, but it doesn’t really change anything.

Back that thang up (cash money, something, something)

The Macs in the house are already doing regular Time Machine backups to a QNAP NAS (which is pretty awesome in its own right, by the way). This handles the “oops, I deleted a file” scenario, and it works great over 802.11n and GbE. It’s automatic, so we don’t have to think about it. As long as the computers are powered on, Time Machine happily runs every hour in the background. The weakest link in this setup is the NAS.

Despite that the NAS is running in RAID 5, RAID is not backup—and it never will be. It can sustain a single drive failure and (hopefully) keep going long enough to add a new drive and rebuild the array. It can’t, however, sustain any number of fires, thefts, or zombie attacks and keep going. For that kind of protection, we specifically need off-site backups.

The underground bunker I don’t have

There are many options when it comes to off-site backups, and that’s probably why it’s taken me so long to come up with something that will work for us. Initially, Jungle Disk seemed like the best option, and I’ve used it since 2008. It’s backed by Amazon S3, which is highly redundant, and you only pay for what you use ($0.15/GB/month, plus bandwidth in and out). Jungle Disk is quite nice, and it’s also cross-platform (Windows/Mac/Linux). Unfortunately, it has some pretty strong cons stacked against it:

• Initial upload takes forever over residential broadband connections
• Limitless scalability, limitless cost (500 GB would cost $75/month)
• Recovery could take almost as long as the initial backup
• Cost is ongoing for as long as your data is backed up

Our DSL connection at home is roughly 7 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up, but even with cable, those numbers aren’t looking any better (12/1 or 16/2 or something close to that). Dropbox (which uses Amazon S3 itself) is great, but it suffers from the same slow pipe problem. In fact, any “cloud-based” backup solution needs to be ruled out for that reason. Mozy, Backblaze, CrashPlan, SugarSync, SpiderOak, etc. are all out.

Low-tech doesn’t necessarily mean no-tech

What we need, then, is a low-tech solution. And the answer lies in cheap hard drives. Seriously. At the time of this post, 1 TB WD Caviar Green drives are $59.99 on Amazon and Newegg. That comes out to $0.058/GB, but it’s not a recurring monthly cost. You pay that once and you’re done with it. Add in a USB/eSATA external enclosure for $20, and then multiply the whole thing by two for the total cost.

“Multiply by two?” you ask. Yes, by two. We’re skipping the internet and going straight to the sneakernet, baby. Here’s how it works. Once a week (probably on Sunday night), I’m going to take images of each computer using SuperDuper. I’ll have to do this twice the very first time—once for each hard drive. Then, I’m going to bring one drive to work and leave it there, along with its power supply for the external enclosure. Every Monday, I’ll rotate the drives. This way, there’s always a backup off-site, and it’s never more than a week old.

The important media files on the NAS will get backed up in the same way with a third+ drive. I say third+ because the capacity of the NAS is 4 TB of protected storage. That will probably happen monthly, and there won’t be any rotation on those drives. I’ll probably bring the drives home on a Friday, run the backups, and then keep them in the safe until they go back to work with the others on Monday. That leaves a brief single point of failure (i.e., the house burns down and melts the safe), but I’m only talking about movies, music, and TV shows here.

Getting some closure on enclosures

One last thought before I wrap it up. I had considered using bare drives (sans external enclosures) with my drive toaster, but I don’t like that idea as much. I’d still need to buy cases to transport the drives, and the risk of electrostatic discharge or some other kind of damage is much higher. In my opinion, it makes more sense to put that money towards enclosures. Plus, I can keep both the enclosure and its power supply off-site. If the house did burn down, I’d have to go out and buy another drive toaster. It’d be the least of my worries.

What sayest thou?

Thoughts? Suggestions? Any glaring omissions on my part? Anyone already doing something like this? Use the comments to describe any backup victories (or failures) you’ve experienced.

Enjoying the status quo

My Google Apps mailbox is puttering along nicely, happily sucking down messages from two other accounts via POP. I originally had set my old Gmail account to forward to my new address, but after noticing that some new messages weren’t forwarded properly, I switched to POP, which seems to be more reliable. I changed all my important stuff directly at the source to point to my new address instead, so it’s really not that big of a deal—just something to be aware of. The other mailbox I’m checking is my Tuffmail account. I have about 30 or 40 addresses delivering to a single mailbox on the Tuffmail side, and then I just poll that single box.

Frustrations start to mount

Everything works pretty well in and of itself, but the problems start to pile up, in spades, when you throw additional Google services into the mix. It seems like there’s a strange dichotomy between Google Apps accounts and Google Accounts (notice the capital A). For those who don’t know, the distinction is this: a Google Apps account is simply one user of your Google Apps domain (you@yourdomain.com). A Google Account, on the other hand, is not related at all. That’s right—it’s completely and totally unrelated. Most commonly, a Google Account is also a Gmail account, but it doesn’t have to be. If you have a Google Apps email address (or any other non-Gmail email address), you can create a Google Account for it. Confused yet?

Google’s a/Accounts don’t play well together

The most notable problem—and my biggest gripe—is that email/Gmail-related functions of Google Apps don’t share data with other services that are accessed via a Google Account. I’ll give you the most prominent example: my Google Voice contacts are separate from my email contacts, even though my Google Voice account is linked to a Google Account that’s really just a Google Apps email address. Again, confused yet? The tasks for my Google Account are different from the tasks for my Google Apps account, and the contacts for my Google Account are different from the contacts for my Google Apps account. I know it seems minor, but the end result is an enormous pain in the butt. Gmail users don’t have this problem!

To further frustrate and complicate things, it looks like once a Google service is associated to a Google Account, it’s destined to be forever linked to that same account. The only exception seems to be Google Analytics, and it was fairly easy to move that over from my old Gmail Google Account to my new Google Apps Google Account. In my mind, you should be able to migrate a Google service to any Google Account you want. Just prove that you own both accounts, and off you go.

No longer a good value

Taking only storage space into consideration, Google Apps Premier Edition is no longer a good value for people using a single account for personal use. For organizations, it still makes a lot of sense, but Google’s recent price cuts on additional Gmail storage give you far more for your money. When I signed up for Google Apps, additional storage for Gmail/Picasa/Docs was $20 for 10 GB and $75 for 40 GB. Google Apps came in right between those with 25 GB for $50. In November of last year, Google started offering 20 GB for $5, 80 GB for $20, and 200 GB for $50.

Now, I’m only using 6% of my 25 GB at the moment, so talking about how I could get 200 GB for the same price seems a little silly. Even so, if Google is going to increase storage and decrease costs, they should do it across the board.

How to fix the mess they’ve made

There are two things that Google could do right now to resolve the sorry state of their Google Accounts. The first would be to link Google Apps accounts and Google Accounts that share the same email address. The behavior would be exactly the same as what already happens with Gmail accounts, except that the domain would be yourdomain.com instead of gmail.com. There would obviously need to be some kind of verification process, but there is absolutely no reason why this shouldn’t be happening. In fact, this is already happening—kind of.

When I’m logged into my Google Account that is also my Google Apps email address, and I try to visit Google Calendar, I’m asked if I want to use my Google Apps calendar or sign in under a different Google Account. Google Calendar knows that a Google Apps account exists with the same email address as my Google Account, or else it wouldn’t be asking!

The second thing Google could do would be to make services portable—and “mergeable”—between Google Accounts. If I want to move my Picasa or Google Voice account to a different Google Account, I should be able to. If Google detects that I already have a Picasa account in both places, it should offer to merge the photos and usernames and so on. Many other service providers have already built this functionality, and Google should be able to as well.

My advice to you

If you are like me and are only looking to host a single account (or a household of accounts) under Google Apps (Premier or Standard editions), think twice. After 14 months of using Google Apps and the corresponding new Google Account I had to create, I wish I had stuck with Gmail. The integration with other Google services is better, the additional storage space is cheaper, and the hassle of changing email addresses is nonexistent. The one benefit of Google Apps is that I get to use my own domain without having to resort to a half-hearted forwarding system that would never set From: headers properly, but it’s not worth it. Take my advice and stick with Gmail.

Update: Gina Trapani, of Lifehacker fame, has written a similar article with valuable input from a real Googler. Maybe that kind of write-up is what we need for this issue to get noticed and gain some traction at the Googleplex.

I’m trying a new feature around here called How I Roll. It seems like I get lots of questions from other people about how/why I do what I do as it relates to tech stuff. For instance, I put a lot of thought into how I handle backups, DNS, web hosting, email, etc., and I figured it might be worthwhile to document and share some of that knowledge. Maybe I can save you some trouble or give you additional insight into something you’re researching for yourself.

For this first installment of How I Roll, I’ll be talking about how I handle web, email, and DNS hosting–the infrastructure-level components of nearly any website. I think it’s really important for those three things to be done right, because these days, online media is the first point of contact for a lot of people.

Let’s talk about DNS first. The most common analogy I’ve heard for DNS is that it’s like the phonebook of the internet. I guess that’s mostly true, but if you don’t already have a strong grasp of what it is and how it works, you shouldn’t be reading this article. A lot of hosting companies and domain registrars provide free DNS hosting, but I tend to stay away from them and do my own thing. 

Nearly every major registrar has had DNS troubles of some kind over the past few years, and that’s understandable. It’s not their core business, it’s not important to them, and it’s not what they do well. Things also get complicated/broken when you start moving to different registrars. Just recently, I moved the majority of my domains from GoDaddy to NameCheap (I couldn’t stand GoDaddy’s low-class advertising or their constant upselling attempts anymore). If I had hosted my DNS with GoDaddy, I would have made a lot of extra work for myself by switching to someone else.

For the same reasons, I don’t let hosting companies handle my DNS, either. I’ve changed hosting companies too many times, and I just don’t feel comfortable giving a single company the “keys to the kingdom”. That’s why I use DNS Made Easy. Their user interface is really awful until you get used to it, and even then, it’s still pretty bad. But they do one thing well, and that’s all that matters: they offer rock-solid DNS hosting at a reasonable price.

Other companies specialize in DNS hosting, so don’t think that DNS Made Easy is the only choice. They just happen to have a very good track record and plans that fit my budget. EveryDNS.net is a free service that does an admirable job, and it was started by David Ulevitch of OpenDNS fame. Unfortunately, EveryDNS has had their own share of issues over the years. I’m mentioning it here because I think it’s the best option for people who aren’t willing to pay for this essential function.

Next on the list is web hosting. Again, I’m not going to explain the differences between shared/dedicated/VPS plans because I assume you already know that. In my earlier years on the web, I was perfectly content with shared hosting. My Linux CLI skills were modest, and I didn’t demand complete control over my server environment (root, baby). In the last 4-5 years, my sysadmin skills have grown and the price of hardware has dropped to the point where I can afford my own box.

The problem is that I don’t need my own box. My blog isn’t exactly on par with Amazon or eBay or Google in terms of traffic. I can get by just fine with a VPS, which is essentially a virtual chunk of a much bigger machine. For what I do, 256 or 512M of memory is more than enough, and I only require a couple gigs of HD space. After searching around for a long time and reading tons of reviews, I decided on Slicehost about a year ago (14 or 15 months ago, actually). They’ve been fantastic. 

After 300 days of uptime, I restarted my box because I wanted to, not because I had to. I think that fact alone speaks to Slicehost’s reliability. Sure, I could build out my own server and drop it in a colo facility somewhere, but that’s cost-prohibitive. I’d be looking at about a grand for the initial build-out and then a monthly colo fee on top of that. And if (when) the hardware fails, it’s all on me. Instead, I choose to pay Slicehost $20/month for use of their high-end hardware and connectivity. When a drive dies, they replace it, and it doesn’t cost me a cent.

Recently, I’ve been exploring some other VPS providers that offer more bang for the buck. Linode and Prgmr.com both provide more capacity for the same price (or less). A server move is a big deal and involves a lot of work, so being the lazy sysadmin that I am, I’m not too keen to pack up and move quite yet.

If you’re still with me, I saved the best for last: email. In 2009, email is absolutely critical, so we can’t take any chances here. Everything from job offers to utility bill notifications are sent via email, and even though the underlying protocols are designed to be fault-tolerant to a certain extent, I’d rather not risk it. Imagine what would happen if your home mailbox suddenly disappeared before the mailman could deliver your mail. Get it?

Well, I’ve had a Gmail account since before they were cool, so I was using that for the longest time. Seriously, I had one of the early invites back in May of 2004–now that’s some geek cred right there. At some point, it occurred to me that I was stupid for not taking advantage of my own domain name, which I’ve had since 2002. I knew I didn’t want to run my own mail server because it would take up too much of my time. (You think it’s easy to stay on top of spam filtering, virus filtering, and block lists?) Besides, it would be cheaper and more reliable to outsource it to a company that specializes in mail hosting.

After researching Google Apps and Tuffmail, I decided to go with Google Apps–sort of. I think Gmail has the best web interface around, and it would have been hard to settle for something less. Google Apps comes in both a free version (Standard) and a paid version (Premier). They have similar feature sets, but you get a 99.9% uptime SLA, 25G of storage space, phone support, and the ability to disable ads with Google Apps Premier. The cost is $50/account/year, and with only one account, that translates to $50/year (I was always this good at math, by the way).

Since I had been using and enjoying my free Gmail account for about five years, I figured it was time to pay it forward by signing up for Premier instead of Standard. I was also getting a little nervous after reading horror stories of people being locked out of their Gmail accounts for days at a time, and I reasoned that a paid user with an SLA would have more protection against that kind of thing. For $0.13/day, the peace of mind, extra space, and lack of ads has been well worth it.

Since Tuffmail is equally awesome in a different way, I decided to use them for all of my auxiliary domains. I’ve got their most basic plan that costs $6/quarter, and they too have been well worth the money. Considering that I would have needed a separate email server at $20/month, paying Tuffmail $24/year is a bargain, and that’s not even counting the cost of my time to manage another box (and an email box, at that). You can set up as many domains as you want at Tuffmail and then have unlimited aliases all deliver to a single physical box. Cool.

Because of the way I’ve set up my essential services, I can continue to receive email even if my website is down. And because of Google’s SLA, I should be able to receive email 99.9% of the time. Changing domain name registrars or hosting companies is a breeze thanks to the decoupled nature of everything. Oh, and did I mention that I’m still able to receive email even when that happens?

I hope this article has been helpful, and I intend to write more like it in the future. Feel free to ask questions or spark up a discussion in the comments.

That’s how I roll.

You will need:

• 1 lb. ground beef (80-90% lean)
• 1/4 cup Worcestershire sauce
• 2 tsp. Old Bay seasoning
• 3 cloves minced garlic (use less or omit if desired)

Here’s how to do it:

1. In a bowl, mix ingredients together. Be careful not to handle the meat too much.
2. Shape into 3 patties. You might be able to get 4 patties per pound of beef, but they’ll end up on the small side.
3. Grill on high heat for about 5 minutes per side. I say about because all grills are different. Tip: oil up your grill with some cooking spray before lighting to prevent the burgers from sticking.
4. Drop a piece of cheese on each burger for the last 30 seconds of cooking. Either colby-jack or cheddar works well.
5. Serve on a toasted bun with condiments (bacon and BBQ sauce, anyone?).

So there you have it: my world-famous burger recipe (depending on your definition of world). Final note: I’ve seen some recipes that call for eggs and breadcrumbs, but in my opinion, that will give you grilled meatloaf rather than a hamburger. Stick with my recipe if you want to please a crowd.

In (hopefully) chronological order, this is what I did in 2008:

• Refereed at Region IV ODP Championships in Phoenix (and was invited back again for the 2009 tournament in just a few weeks).
• Purchased a shotgun to maintain my average of 1 new gun/year.
• Graduated from the prestigious (tee-hee) Eller College of Management at the University of Arizona with a B.S. in Business Administration and a focus on MIS (ranked fourth in the nation at the time I graduated).
• Moved into a new apartment.
• Bought a motorcycle, learned how to ride it, took a safety course, and got an M endorsement on my license—in that order.
• Had my first motorcycle accident after summer rains washed some sand onto the road.
• Left behind a great job and great friends at Ephibian for a new opportunity and just to see what else was out there.
• Switched to Mac (again) by purchasing a black MacBook just after the new aluminum models came out (intentionally).
• Went back to freelance work (again) with the unofficially official title of Web Ninja.
• Traveled to New Mexico, Colorado, and Minnesota for the first time ever.
• Lost a super-hot girlfriend but gained a super-hot fiancée and the love of my life instead.

I hope I’m not forgetting something. Write a comment and let me know if I did anything else last year.

And in the same region there were shepherds out in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And an angel of the Lord appeared to them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were filled with fear. And the angel said to them, “Fear not, for behold, I bring you good news of great joy that will be for all the people. For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is Christ the Lord. And this will be a sign for you: you will find a baby wrapped in swaddling cloths and lying in a manger.” And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying,

“Glory to God in the highest,
and on earth peace among those with whom he is pleased!”

Ironically, Apple ruined my black/gray color scheme with all their white cables: white USB, white power adapter, and white mini-DVI to DVI converter. Just the other night, my brother and I were wondering why the black MacBooks come with a white power brick. I’m surprised that Mac users haven’t picketed in front of Apple HQ yet.

The headphones are Sennheiser HD-280 Pros, and the keyboard is a Customizer 104 made by the same people who manufactured the original IBM Model M keyboards. You can’t see it in this picture, but the trackball off to the right is a Kensington Expert Mouse. The mug at the very top of the frame was holding my hot chocolate until I drank it all, courtesy of Media Temple.

The most obvious difference is the layout. I had been working on replacing the default WordPress theme for a while, but then I came across Derek Punsalan’s Grid Focus theme. It’s very clean and minimal, just like my own design that’s still in development, and I think it looks pretty sharp. I’ll give it a shot for a while and see how it goes, but my feeling at this point is that anything is better than the tired-looking blue default theme.

Another important change has to do with site URLs and search engine optimization (SEO). You might have noticed that permanent links for posts now end in .html and include the title of the post. This will help search engines rank and index my content since relevant words are now contained in the URL itself. An additional benefit is that I can easily switch to static pages if I need to reduce server load quickly (Digg or Slashdot). Old links containing only the post ID should continue to work just fine.

Thanks to the Google XML Sitemaps plugin, I now have an accurate Sitemap-compliant sitemap containing a listing of all content generated by WordPress. My sitemap.xml and sitemap.xml.gz  files are recreated every day around midnight, and I configured Google Webmaster Tools to pick up on that and take care of it.

Finally, WordPress 2.7 was officially released yesterday, and I upgraded right away after having tested both RC1 and RC2. The most visible new change is the admin interface/dashboard, and they really did a great job with it. While poking around, I noticed some new configuration options as well, and one of them directly affects how comments work on this site.

There is now a 21-day commenting window on all posts that allow comments (which should be all of them). I like this change a lot because it will prevent people from resurrecting posts with discussions that have been dead for months. An added benefit is that spam should go down since there will never be more than a handful of posts available to comment on. So, if you have something to say, make sure you say it within three weeks of the original post date!

Oh, and one more minor thing: I posted my email address on the About Me page and I’m keeping it safe from spammers with the help of reCAPTCHA. If you need to get in touch, head over there to contact me. It’s a pretty cool system, and I might move to reCAPTCHA for comment validation in the future.