July 10, 2007
freesoftware, General, home
15 Comments
I’m looking for a back-up solution which is easy to use. Ideally, I don’t want to have to decide what I need to back up and what I don’t – disk space is not an issue.
My dream app would be a graphical application which has back-up profiles – system configuration, personal data, application settings, media files, and maybe user-installed applications.
Ideally, I would be able to do incremental back-ups (à la rsync) where the weekly back-up will only be saving the new email, files and pr0n, and not the 30GB that was backed up first time round.
Also, a restore facility would be nice. In the past, when I have backed up files and had to restore, I have had issues because the user files were backed up for uid 501, and the corresponding account after installing the system anew was 502 (or something like that). I don’t want to have to think about user rights – I want to, as root, restore the system, and have user accounts, files, configuration all recreated as they were at the last back-up.
Anyone know of an easy one-click solution for Linux for the man who wants back-ups, but doesn’t want to have to think about them?
Update: I should probably mention that the back-ups will be to an external USB disk, and will be on-demand. I don’t want to leave the disk plugged in all the time, and I don’t want to have to think about plugging it in on Thursday evening to have the back-up done on Friday morning. Also, I’ll be backing up 3 different systems – including 2 on one double-boot machine. So ssh + rsync via a cron job is probably not the idel solution (but many thanks for the many people proposing it).
July 5, 2007
General
6 Comments
The interesting thing about the recent Google “Sicko” controversy and the reaction to the controversy is the persistence of the myth that corporations have opinions on anything.
The story, for those who haven’t heard about it, is that someone from Google blogged about a movie they didn’t agree with, and a newspaper picked up the story as “Google didn’t like Sicko”. Since then, Google’s communication staff have been working hard to say “No, Google likes “Sicko”, really”.
Shouldn’t they be saying “Google is a non-physical non-thinking entity, it can’t like or dislike anything”? Isn’t the whole point of corporate blogging to show that a company is not a Borg-like entity where some company position (which the president or VP likes) gets proliferated down the organisation to be adopted by mindless drones?
How about this as a non-denial denial? “Google’s management is very proud that our employees have the ability to express their personal opinions through our corporate blog. The diversity of opinion is something which makes our company stronger and richer. We stand by our employees, and have complete trust in their ability to exercise good judgement in their blogging activities.”
June 29, 2007
General
7 Comments
A while back it seemed to be cool to talk about “firing your customers” if they were bad – that is, if they were not really clear on what they wanted, were asking you to change away from your core competencies to gain their contract, or were being very needy and impatient before (or after) signing a contract.
I’d love to hear about people’s reactions to this. Are there good clients and bad clients?
My own opinions are that if you’re in a position where you want to fire a client, someone hasn’t done their job right. Isn’t before-sales in a large part helping decode what the client wants, and explaining to him how your product/service fits into that picture? Isn’t the whole sales process supposed to be about figuring out if selling your products & services will be mutually beneficial?