Chris Norton » apple

Backup Solutions for Linux

Chris Norton — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:23:18 +0000

Now that Leopard has been released a few people are commenting on the usability of Time Machine as a backup system for “ordinary people”. As is usually the case, what Apple have done here is slap a GUI on functionality that Linux and UNIX systems have had for years. Naturally though, because Time Machine looks so pretty and is grabbing more headlines that the humble rsync, there are some efforts to bring a similar system to Linux.

Two that I’ve found are TimeVault and the newer FlyBack, which makes no excuse about being a lame Time Machine clone … without the actual clone part since it’s not nearly as nice looking.

Of course, if you don’t go in for all this pretentious GUI crap, you can also use tools which do the same thing but are designed to run as simple daemons. Some popular ones are Dirvish and rsnapshot. If you want to get really fancy and space efficient you can even go for something like rdiff-backup, which only stores the change deltas of older versions of files.

Personally I store all my important work in a Subversion repository since I normally do development work with it anyway. It’s not very space efficient but a lot more powerful.

What backup system do you use? If you’re a Linux user, did I miss any good ones?

Mac OS X 10.5 review

Chris Norton — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 17:31:30 +0000

Ars Technica has a lengthy review of Mac OS X “Leopard”.

Chris sees an iPhone

Chris Norton — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 16:34:40 +0000

I had the opportunity to see an actual iPhone in action today. I must say that, even though I’ve seen plenty of pictures and read a bunch of reviews on the product, I was surprised as how nice it looked. They’re quite small and the touch interface is pretty slick. Browsing the web with Safari was pretty simple for such a small device and a couple other apps I saw looked good as well. I didn’t get long to gawk at it though so I don’t have anything in-depth to report.

It does make me wonder when exactly Apple will release them down under. I sincerely hope that the few annoyances they have are sorted out by then: things like phone company lock-in and charging 99 cents US (which should be $1.69 here, same as iTunes songs) is all kinds of ridiculous. Allowing for 3rd party applications would be good too. As a web developer I think that because of the iPhone, combined with the new iPod Touch, Mobile Safari is going to become more and more popular so I’d better start looking into how to make my sites compatible with it.