Tag: backup

Restore Gmail contacts

Today, when I navigated to my Gmail contacts, I was greeted by the following message:

The “Learn more” link points to the page with very simple restore instructions:

  1. Click Contacts.
  2. From the More actions drop-down menu, choose Restore contacts.
  3. Choose the time you’d like to revert your contacts list to (e.g. 10 minutes ago, one hour ago, one week ago, etc). We suggest that you also make a note of the time that you restore your contacts, in case you’d like to return to where you started.
  4. Click Restore. You’ll see a confirmation at the top of the screen when the rollback is complete.

 

Out of disk space

Last night the server ran out of disk space while doing a backup.  That affected most of the sites and some services hosted on this server.   I have cleaned up some space since, and made sure that there will be enough of it for the backups to run.  I’ll also keep an eye on it to see if there was some other problem hiding behind the disk space issue.

Apologies to everyone who was affected.

Zip vs. Bzip2

While investigating an unrelated issue on our backup server, I came across an interesting discussion about gzip vs. bzip2. I was surprised to read on how much slower bzip2 is.  I even tested it on our server.  And as expected, I saw the huge difference.

$ du -sh home
819M  home

$ time tar czf test.tar.gz home
real	3m29.741s
user	1m4.026s
sys	0m5.629s

$ time tar cjf test.tar.bz2 home
real	11m38.751s
user	6m19.259s
sys	0m7.237s

$ ll test.tar*
-rw-r--r-- 1 leonid users 365987716 2010-06-29 13:08 test.tar.bz2
-rw-r--r-- 1 leonid users 390655750 2010-06-29 12:56 test.tar.gz

For such a small difference in size, the compression time difference is huge! Of course, I should play with more parameters, repeat the tests several times, and test the decompression time too. But the above test is still a good indication. Way too many scripts out there use the default parameters and substitute gzip with gzip2 without any testing. That’s obviously asking for trouble.

VaultPress – yet another goodie from Automattic

Automattic – an awesome company behind WordPress, Gravatar, IntenseDebate, Akismet, and a few other – announced that they are starting up a new service – VaultPress.  While the details of the service are not completely clear yet, it looks like a real-time backup solution plus some security monitoring and automated updates.  This service is primarily targeted towards stand-alone WordPress blogs, not the ones hosted at WordPress.com .  Maybe WordPress.com support will come later, but for now those guys are settled pretty well anyway.

If you want to try VaultPress, it is in the invite-only stage now.  You can request an invite.  And while you are there, please do enjoy the beautiful form, which doesn’t follow the conventional “captions, fields, and the submit button” concept.  That’s what happens when you have a good web designer around and enough sense to let him work.