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November 23, 2004
if anyone comes across a 12" powerbook with serial number UV40504####...
This past weekend I had my laptop stolen. I was in a sound check at work and left it unattended on the other side of the gallery. Usually this wouldn't have been a problem as Eyebeam is usually locked and secure. But we had lots of people loading in a show that day. Someone had probably left the building and didn't know to lock the door behind them. So in the ten minutes that the door was unlocked, someone walked in, found the laptop, and stuffed it down his pants. Goodbye laptop.
I hadn't backed up in weeks. three months of digital photos: gone. about a hundred hours of original video: gone. at least a dozen new ideas put down on sticky notes: I can't even think about it. i lost at least fifty hours of project work. that really sucked. I spent a good hour or two combing over the building searching for it. I spend at least 12 hours a day on and off of the thing. most of my waking life was on that laptop. The rest was just a cron job. It was pretty fucking traumatic.
But I'll deal. All my passwords are changed. Most of my data recovered up until September or so. The good thing is that the iDisk is set to sync up to Apple's servers everytime it goes online. So a police report has been filed with the NYPD. Apple Corporate Security should soon be on the case. If it goes online, I'll be waiting. If I get it back, cool. If not, well, hopefully I'm in karmic debt for something good.
So what is the lesson in all of this? Well, first, back the fuck up. But the bigger lesson is more than that. The bigger lesson is that I need a way to automatically sync up all of my data wherever I am, whenever I have an internet connection. The bigger lesson is that I need a web os. Fortunately, there are enough resources out there for me to roll my own. Here's what I'm thinking so far:
First, I should mention that I'm doing this b/c I just have too much data across too many devices. Between the mac laptop, the mac desktop, the pc desktop, the cell phone, and the ipod, I need to put all of my data on a central server and start thinking of the rest of these devices as terminals.
Server: So I'm dropping the mac desktop and installing some flavor of BSD on it. It's an old single proc G4 with about a TB of SATA disk in it. This will become my personal server. I'm going to try to track down a used VXA drive for under $250. My only reservations about using the G4 is that I can't find a good SATA hardware RAID card for it. I'd use the PC desktop (an old VAIO) but the support for power management under BSD or linux on this model is pretty lacking.
DynDNS: There's no place like home. Since the server will be sitting at home on my broadband connection, I'll need a way to find it. So DynDNS will be very helpful.
Backups: I'm undecided on how I should do backups on this box. Should I mimic Apple's iDisk and set up a WebDAV server or should I shut down all of the ports and just do scheduled rsync backups over ssh?
Perhaps I'll divide my work up into two types (online and nearline) and use WebDAV for current files (the first) and rsync+ssh for archived work (the latter).
Email: I have too many email accounts to care for, so I'm going to download all of my email to my personal server, and use IMAP over an SSH tunnel to get to it. Need to find more resources for this.
Web browsing: All bookmarks now move to del.icio.us with regular local backups made to this blog (the 'daily' entries). Changes to the MT database will be mirrored to my backup server.
I'm forgetting something.... calendars and contacts. And syncing with a phone. Need to think about these things or ask for suggestions. I'll update this post as I find more info.
Posted by yatta at November 23, 2004 6:26 PM
Comments
Hey I had my laptop stolen about six month ago, a PowerBook in fact. Although I didn't do much useful work on it, I treated it as if it was my external organ.
I am planning to buy a new one early next year when the price goes down to allow the Intel-based ones. Can you tell me what sort of stuff I should consider doing or buying, so that it will never get stolen?
Posted by: Aina at December 20, 2005 10:49 AM