World Backup Day

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For those of you who don’t know, today March 31st is World Backup Day. In our increasingly digitized world, keeping your data safe and secure both professionally and personally becomes increasingly important!

Today I received an email from Host Gator with the following stats:

  • All hard drives will crash during their lifetime
  • More than 1 in 10 laptops will be stolen in their lifetime
  • A laptop is stolen every 53 seconds
  • Every year 46% of computer users lose their music, photos, and documents
  • 50% of all hard drives will crash within 5 years
  • 89.1% of PC users don’t perform regular backups
  • A recent study from Gartner, Inc., found that 90 percent of companies that experience data loss go out of business within two years.
  • 70 percent of companies go out of business after a major data loss

If you are not regularly backing up your files please take the time to find and setup a backup solution. You can read a number of articles on how to backup your computer at WorldBackupDay.com.

Personally I use a mixture of Rsync and Rsnapshot to backup both my personal and business data. I love the amount of control I have over the backup process, and the fact that none of my data is stored in a proprietary format that locks me into one company or program.

If you aren’t backing up your website MennoSites.ca can help you setup an automatic, easy to use solution.

Using Trickle to Control Bandwidth Use in Any Program

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There are a number of reasons why you would want to control how much bandwidth any given program is able to use. This can be done in a couple different ways, including options right with in the software, or through a software or hardware firewall. A great little program for managing bandwidth use is Trickle. Trickle runs completely in userspace, which means we don’t need to mess with a firewall, or even need root access.

If you’re on Ubuntu/Debian you should be able to install Trickle using

sudo apt-get install trickle

Now that you’ve got Trickle installed just use it before any network command to limit its bandwidth. Quite self-explanatory -u specifies upload and -d download.

trickle -u 25 -d 100 myCommand

The reason I first started using Trickle was so I could use Rsync and SCP to copy/backup files on my computer without negatively affecting the speed of my Internet connection. I have a fairly limited upload speed and this is an example of how I would limit the upload speed to 100 KB/s when backup up a folder with Rsync. Please note that when using Trickle with Rsync you have to use the -e option.

trickle -a -e "trickle -u 100 ssh" myFiles matthew@example.com:/home/matthew/backups/

It is even easier using Trickle with SCP where all you would need to do is use:

trickle -u 100 scp myFile.zip matthew@example.com:/home/matthew/backups/