Now that a number of people are running web logs on my server, it was time to put in place a much better backup process. I don’t want to lose all those good words (or pictures)! I spent the evening figuring out how to make a nightly copy of all the files associated with all the weblogs. While it isn’t particularly rocket science, it did take a lot of trial and error and in the process, was a good learning experience for me. Now all of the weblogs are copied, compressed, and stored on a separate computer every morning about 1 a.m. The entire process takes about a half-hour and results in a backup copy of about a gigabyte of data. Tomorrow I’ll figure out how to shove that information off to a couple of CD’s so I can once a week make an archival copy. The other choice is to figure out how to have my iMac Mini write the whole backup to a DVD. That might be even more interesting.

At Macworld last week, among a host of other announcements, was an announcement of a new upgrade to the Apple operating system. I’m now two versions behind, so it’s time to do an upgrade. With the new version comes a very nice scripting and automation tool and that could be the ticket to automatically write the DVD once a week in the middle of the night (as long as an empty DVD is in the drive??).

Previously I would make a backup of the web server every couple of weeks, or when I remembered. Now it’ll get backed up every morning and a hard drive problem will no longer be catastrophic. Maybe that’ll help me sleep better at night?