Quite a few people have been asking me recently how I do my backups, either because they are geeky enough to want to know another geek’s opinion, or because they simply have no idea where to start. So here is my view on making backups and a little insight into my backup strategy.

A bit of “theory”

The reason for making backups should be obvious to all, but apparently it isn’t so here is a little reality check. Let me put it simple: unless you have your data at least twice, you don’t “have” it at all. Whatever media you use to store your data on, it is not a question of “if” that data will ever be lost, but the question “when” it will. If a hard drive dies and you permanently lose some data, it’s your fault, not the disk manufacturer’s or anybody else’s.

Do realize that “backing up” your data to CD or DVD and then deleting the data from your hard drive does not count as properly backing up. You need to have every data twice!

So I need two versions of all my data?

Theoretically, yes. Having your data twice protects you against any of these 2 versions getting lost. In practice though, your main data storage (your pc or notebook) and your backup (your external drive) will often be in the same place together (your house, flat, office, studio). This means that you only need one flood, fire, thief or other disaster to destroy all your versions.

So, to cut to the point you better make sure you also have a second off-site-backup at a different location.

So if I backup I can retrieve any of my data I ever had?

Most backup solutions don’t offer backup versioning. To put this in human terms, this means that you can only go back in time to the last backup you made, nothing before that. Every backup in these cases overwrites the previous backup. There are backup solutions though that offer versioning like Subversion, CVS and the Apple Time Machine software.

The problem of versioning backups is that they tend to grow quickly when your data changes a lot. This is because every change is saved. In other words: if you download loads of videos per week and watch them the same week and trow them away, your disk space might stay constant but your backup will grow fast as it is saving all those videos. Versioning is often only used on very small (but important) data like documents because these sizes tend to be manageable.

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Czeers is a startup by a former house mate David Czap and a friend of his. What do they make? Solarboats! Based on the winning race boat of the 2005 Nuon solar boat challenge, these boats feature a unique design with zero emissions.

Oh, yeah, and they are fast (see video below)!

After promoting hAvatar during BarcampBrighton and SemanticCamp, I was starting to get pretty happy with the response we got from people. So, you can imagine how annoyed I was when suddenly my own avatar stopped working on several sites. Today I took a dive into the code behind the hAvatar plugin for Wordpress, and most importantly: hKit.

Problem Found

As I expected the issue was not with Alper’s code of the hAvatar plugin but rather with the hKit PHP library. As a step in the process of determining the hCard in the hKit library, the source code that is read is “Tidied”. hKit has 3 build in ways of doing this, the default being using the W3C tidy service.

The W3C service is a very simple service that simply takes a URL as a parameter like this:

http://cgi.w3.org/cgi-bin/tidy?docAddr=http://google.com/

As a result this gives the tidied output of the source of that URL. Now the serious issue that I ran into was that for some weird reason my URL (http://cristianobetta.com) causes a timeout in this service. To be more precise: about every URL on my server causes an issues. Obviously I contacted my hosting provider about this issue but let’s put the problem in a different perspective.

The Bottleneck Dillema

The problem here in my opinion is that hKit relies on a “bottleneck” in their process. Normally this bottleneck only causes a performance issue, but this time it even caused errors. Sadly though, because of this use hKit is not really a standalone script and things can therefore go wrong without hKit knowing. In my opinion hKit would be much more interesting if it shipped with an in-build, platform independent solution to take care of this step.

There are currently some other options besides the proxy to tidy up code. One of the settings of hKit allows for changing the tidy mode to “exec”, “php” or “none”. The first tries to use the tidy command, the second the tidy php functions. Unfortunately none of both are by default available on most systems, making an easy deployment of hAvatar on those systems way harder. To use the “php” option the tidy library needs to be compiled into PHP, which is sometimes impossible, and to use the “exec” command a binary is needed, which makes the solution rather platform dependent.

The Plead

So here I am, asking for a new solution that makes hKit a more independent library. I think it makes sense from a technical and philosophical perspective, but most of all from a performance view. Currently hKit isn’t that fast already (you can’t instance it more than once, making parallel processing of avatars fairly hard) and I think that a server side, non-proxy solution would seriously give this kit a performance boost. Obviously I would be happy as people would by default probably be able to load my avatar, as where it is currently unclear why W3C can’t fetch my url.

* Update: After an email with my hosting provider it seems that the W3C proxy now has access to my server, enabling all hAvatar activities on my domains. Still, I think my point above is valid from a performance point of view.

Last week we saw the launch of Tipit.to, the Dutch startup by Reinier, Jeroen and Alper. Tipit is a webservice that allows anyone to give a small tip (starting at 1 cent) to anyone. Tips are aggregated before payed and a similar system is used for payout. This makes it way more easier to pay a tip using Tipit than having to go through the PayPal process for every 10 cents you want to pay someone.

Why tips?

So why would you leave tips? Well honestly there are numerous reasons, but I always like to think about it as a good anti-advertisement measure. Most sites show Google Ads simply because the income they get from it pay for the server bills, which doesn’t mean they feel happy to have to show their users advertisement. Instead, a Tipit button on a website could allow users to make simple and easy donations, eliminating the need of advertisement.

Creative uses

There are obviously other reasons to have a tipjar besides preventing advertisements, and since the launch last week we have already seen a few uses that were pretty creative. The most notable is Lauren, who’s house burned down and is now looking for some money to get his life back on track (photos and videos here, or tip him here).

How to join?

Setting up your own tipjar is pretty easy, just go to Tipit.to, sign up, create a tipjar, and place the nice button on your site. In contrary to other services like Paypal they don’t need an awful lot of info about you before you can set up an account, and in contrary to services like TipJoy they pay out real money.

Is tipping the future?

I personally think we will see more and more tipping in the future. Tipping is the logical extend of the currently increased social activity on the web. Recent research shows that people are clicking less and less on advertisements and honestly I think we all hate to see them around anyway. Add on top of this that many people are starting to feel more and more invested in the sites they use day in and day out (see Flickr users vs the Yahoo/MS news), and tipping is definitely going to be hot in 2008.

So last weekend I went to SemanticCamp, a semantic BarCamp organized by Tom Morris here in London at Imperial College. The event was kind of “OK”. I said OK because honestly the event was not the best thing for me. I personally went because I was wondering what all this “semantic” stuff was all about. I guess more people had the same idea, and as a result, at most of the times, only 1 talk was going on. Combine this with a lot of no-shows and you get bored soon. I didn’t feel like listening to too many talks on RDF so I hung around with some people in the other rooms instead.

There were some great things about SemanticCamp though, most important of which was the organization, the location, and the drinks afterwords. One of the other great things about SemanticCamp was the Semantopoly game, custom made by Jon Linklater-Johnson. The game is a kind of Monopoly where you can play a web “celebrity” and buy technologies and social networks to make mashups and get venture capital. One of the board characters was Jeremy Keith so image the joy we had when Jeremy decided to play himself in the game.

Here are the photos: