Bryce on Technology

I am becoming a better systems administrator every day secondary to my work as a ruby on rails and PHP developer. As a very small development shop I have very limited resources to perform the backup and recovery policies bigger shops and huge enterprises employ.

However, after just a morning of futzing with a few key linux commands and better utilizing a service I already back up my source code to (www.github.com) I have a found a robust and secure way to handle automated, off-site, redundant backups in a way that will let me compete with some bigger shops. I’ve posted the code below so I hope you will find it useful. Over the next few posts, I’ll unpack what I’ve written and the philosophy behind it.

A few things bothered me in the way I was doing traditional backups:

1. I knew I had to get them off-site, but actually finding time to get off-site (to a secure location) wasn’t happening.
2. The backup had to be absolutely secure. My clients’ source code is too precious and leakage too damaging to make even one mistake with security breach
3. Had to be simple and automated. I usually have 10 other things I need to do at the same time. I didn’t want backups to be number 11.
4. Small file size. Again, being a small dev shop, I didn’t want to put a lot of cost into storage of incremental backups
5. Incremental backups were key since I don’t want to go to all this trouble only to restore a copy of the bad data I was trying to replace. If I a problem isn’t made known until after the next set of backups are made, I’d be overwriting bad data with bad data; better to restore to the point before the problem happened.

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Using Gmail on any Blackberry has been pretty annoying. I always got a bunch of extranious emails and it would send my replies as new messages to my blackberry. I’ve met a few people with this same problem and this is how we’ve all solved it:

It’s unfortunate, but it’s best just to disable email service from Blackberry for your Gmail account. You’ll need to login to your Blackberry service and sever the connection between Blackberry and Gmail. Fear not, for all is not lost! You’ll still get notifications when you receive new emails.

The next step is to go to Google’s mobile products home page and download their Gmail application. This will take just a few seconds to download and install.

After it’s been installed, simply go to your Blackberry’s application folder and find the newly installed Gmail application. Click on it to launch it and feed it your login credentials. It should log you straight into your gmail account and work just as it does from the web. Best of all, you can adjust the settings to notify you when you get new messages so it feels just like your normal Blackberry email.

How-To, Uncategorized Consumer Technology, How-To