At this time of year I try and avoid the whole new years resolution, get fit, do more trap. What I do do is clean up after the previous year and that normally informs what I want to achieve in the new year. So that is what I am currently doing in January 2017.
I am having a primarily digital cleanup.
So I have started by making sure that my backup strategy is A) working, B)tested and c) fit for purpose. I currently use Git-Annex to hold all my digital data (I manually archive into years), and I use Git-Annex to maintain copies on external hard drives and also out onto S3.
It is not ideal, now that the number of files has grown quite as large as it has git-annex is very slow to startup. And thats not great, but it works pretty reliably. And to date test restores have worked. Next week I hope to try a rebuild of a laptop and restore from Annex that way… I am not sure how confident I feel.
Git annex is basically a stopgap to a solution I have not found/discovered/coded yet. What I actually want is a automated tiered storage solution. In my laptop I have a fast (but not large) SSD, then a 1TB spinning disk drive, then S3, dropbox, glacier, etc. So what I actually want is for the files I am touching often to live on the SSD, then if I don’t touch it for a while for it to move to the HDD, then to shuffle to to the cloud if I don’t touch the file for even longer. Ideally transparently.
Next websites….
So I own a bunch of domains and websites, I also have some open source software projects. Most of which gather dust primarily. So I am going through the sites/domains and taking a look and seeing what state they are in.
An example is my vwjl.net (aka e-judo) project. This is a Perl5 project that started as a re-write of a earlier project I ran providing a virtual Judo competition circuit. Some regular readers may have even played on it. Of course your memory of it might be a bit blurry as the code I looked at this week was a re-write of the code I started in…. 2003!! The last comment on the code is more recent… 2004. So I am taking some time to revisit the quite frankly dreadful code (I obviously had not discovered perltidy for a start). Once I have a feel for it I’ll be deciding how to proceed.
I have also just ported my JudoWRL.com site to TLS. This is interesting as the code was previously hosted on Github pages where HTTPS is not possible. So it gave me a chance to play with Netlify, so far so good. There is also one outstanding issue around using local storage I would like to put to bed.
So, stay tuned dear reader, as I continue my 2017 digital cleanup. If you are aware of one of my projects that could do with some TLC please let me know.
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