Tag: backup

Backup black hole

I just had to look for something that got deleted in one of the systems I administrate.  We have daily backups for the last week, weekly backups for the last two month, monthly backups for the last year, and yearly backups for ever.  That seemed like a sensible backup plan.  Unfortunately, the item that I was looking for was deleted created and deleted a couple of weeks ago.  It probably made it into one of the daily backups, but got rotated out.  And it didn’t live long enough to get into the weekly backup.  And now it’s gone.

(It wasn’t anything critical – but it would be awesome to restore it anyway.)

If it was a file, a backup tool like HashBackup could have made sure I’d never lose it.  But it was an item in the database, of which I have a compressed dump.  I’m guessing it’s probably the time to look for a proper database backup tool…

Any recommendations for MySQL?

Download your Gmail and Google Calendar data … soon or now

I am a well known Google fan.  But even those who call it an Evil Corporation and a Global Spy, can’t argue with the awesomeness of these news:

Starting today we’re rolling out the ability to export a copy of your Gmail and Google Calendar data, making it easy to back up your data or move to another service.

You can download all of your mail and calendars or choose a subset of labels and calendars. You can also download a single archive file for multiple products with a copy of your Gmail, Calendar, Google+, YouTube, Drive, and other Google data.

gmail data export

Most of the 20 GB of data I store on Google Drive is actually my email archive.  I’ve imported email into my Gmail from as early as 1998 – much, much earlier than Gmail was even born.  Having a way to export them all out in one go, without using clunky POP or IMAP is much appreciated.