Posts Tagged ‘backup’

Annotating photos with tweets

Sunday, September 11th, 2011

I have a lot of digital photos.

An insane amount – something like 40,000 photos that go back over a dozen years since I first got a digital camera at University.

I store them based on the date that they were taken, using a folder structure like this:

screenshot of folder structure where I store photos

For a while, I used to drop a readme.txt text file into some of the folders saying where the photos were taken or what I was doing. This was partly so that when I look at the photos ten years later I’ve got something to remind me what is going on, but mainly to make it possible for me to search for photos of something when I can’t remember the date it happened.

But in recent years, I’ve been too lazy to keep that up, and rarely ever add a readme file.

I thought that my tweets might be a good alternative. There is a reasonable chance that if I took a photo of something interesting, that I might have tweeted sometime that day about where I am or what I’m doing.

I wanted to populate each of my folders with a day’s photos in it with a tweets.txt text file containing tweets posted on that day.

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Jungle Disk – online backup using Amazon S3

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

I’ve mentioned Jungle Disk in a few tweets before, but now I’ve got my first few bills from them, I thought I’d write a longer post about what they’re like.

For the uninitiated, Jungle Disk is an application that lets you use Amazon’s S3 storage as an online file store and backup service. You can set the app up to point at a directory of your hard-drive and forget about it – letting the client backup your files in the background. And you can get the client for Windows, Mac and Linux.

I started using it last December for digital photos. I had over 20 gigs of photos and video clips – photos from Uni, photos of my daughter’s first few years, photos from my wedding… and tons more.

And I wanted to put them somewhere safe.

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Making an offline copy of a wiki

Saturday, February 9th, 2008

We use a Confluence wiki for one of the projects that I work on. Wikis can be a fantastic tool for collaboration, and this wiki is a single place where we can share information and our progress.

But we’ve been having problems with the reliability of the wiki – it is unavailable at times, and can be painfully slow at others. Key information that I need is in that wiki, and when the wiki goes down it can be difficult and frustrating.

Yesterday, I had a play with wget to try and download an offline copy of the wiki to use as a backup for when it isn’t working or is going painfully slow.

I’ve put the steps I took here, in case they will be useful for others.

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