The Importance of Backupping
Friday I was connecting to my Linode from my cell phone over ssh... The connection was a little laggy, and as I connected I hit up twice and hit enter before looking. The command that got run was not 'screen -dr' like I thought, it was 'find . -user mwalling | xargs rm -v' (I had been using this command to clean up after Twirssi when I was running it in debug mode).
Anyhow, after realizing that I didn't lose much data, I decided to stop stalling and create a backup solution. I wanted something that was smart, and that could push off to my S3 account. I started looking at BackupPC, but realized that that needed perl-suid (which would require rebuilding the perl package). It was a little complicated feeling as well and had no native way to speak to S3, so I decided not to go that route. My next stop was duplicity. This program seems to do enough of what I need. I smashed together a script to run nightly that combines mysqlhotcopy and duplicity, and pushed it to my git repository.
In other news, I'm pulling my email off of Google Apps and running it locally, after a message from my mother bounced with a "recipient exceeded their incoming rate limit" message. More on that after I finish it.