Aquarionics

This morning, I was entirely weirded out when the lights in the hallway of our block of flats appeared to follow me.

The light outside the front door was on, and as I walked towards the lift they switched on and off in sequence, a controlled pool of light that followed my every move.

The lights in the lift weren’t working properly either, and only the one near the door has ever worked properly, so I wasn’t that suspicious until I got to the lobby of the building, and once again was followed out by this flowing pool of illumination, silence save for the “click” as the light behind me switched off, and the light ahead of me switched on.

Outside was darkness, strange despite the bleak midwinter cold for my phone claimed 8am, and I double checked my possessions – Glasses, Phone, Keys, Wallet – as I buzzed myself out of the building.

I was distinctly unprepared for the spotlight.

The darkness above me was absolute; none of sun, moon or stars to indicate the presence of the sky, a few street lamps bathing the world around them a distinctly sodium orange glow; but around me and cast very obviously from above me was an oval of white light that pointed in front of me. As I stepped forward it followed me exactly, and I looked up to see what cast it.

There was nothing there at all. No bright point of light to blind me, just a deep velvet darkness that swallowed the universe, and no visible source for the spotlight that followed my every move. I stepped backwards, forwards, ran sideways, dodged left and right. It followed exactly. I lay down on the path and it grew larger to encompass me, I walked under a bus shelter and it vanished; only to reappear as I passed the shelter by.

The streets were empty, although I could see the spotlights of others far ahead of me. The occasional car passed in the darkness. I walked on.

* * *

A few other people were in the office working, though almost anyone who had seen the news had taken its advice and stayed home. We sat, glued to our chosen information channels. The darkness, apparently, was absolute. Nobody knew where the spotlights were coming from, who controlled them, or why. Reports from confused satellites reported the absence of stars, although whether that was due to their absence or a dust cloud or something nobody seemed quite sure.

The sun still appeared to exist, international temperatures were as normal, plants would grow. Animals across the planet – all in their own tiny spotlights, none as bright as those I had seen – were panicking. The spotlights themselves appeared to indicate something, some peoples’ being dimmer or brighter according to no known measure. The advice was to keep calm and wait for the smart people to work out what was going on.

Nobody ever did, and so we sit in the darkness so many months later, watching out over the field behind our flat, the occasional light flitting across the field as a rabbit runs for its life, the light suddenly going out as it escapes down the rabbit hole.

You should back up your data.

You should periodically review this backup system to make sure you can get data back off it, but you should back up your data.

I’ve been doing this “computer guy” thing for a while now, and these are three things I have learnt are always true:

1. The only way to be absolutely sure you get rid of a virus is to nuke the system it’s sitting on.
2. Backup solutions that require the user to perform an action don’t work.
3. The universe tends to irony WRT backup systems. And everything else.

The second is always true, from the lowliest “I want the blue “e” to work again” casual user though the most fan-speed obsessed poweruser to the most jaded and cynical sysadmin, if your backup system requires you to actually do something, then it’ll happen less often than it needs to and the time you fail to do it, or fail to check it, will be the day your harddrive dies.

Apple’s Time Machine is great, because it automatically syncs stuff to an external hard drive or network backup as you’re using the machine. If you have a laptop with it, set it up with a network backup, because while it warns you about your last backup being out of date it will go away if you tell it to, and that’s a recipe for badness.

Obviously this is where I explain how my backup system is the ultimate, most perfect way to solve this problem, but it isn’t. This the way that works for me:

Dropbox

My music, documents and projects get synced to Dropbox on a continuous basis as I’m using them (it used to be just Documents, but I started using them as a full backup system last year) and from there synced back down to my other machines (Directly over the lan with the latest version). By sharing subfolders with other accounts, Documents & Projects get synced down to my laptop when it gets plugged into wifi (it doesn’t have the disk space for the whole thing) and as soon as Dropbox sort sub-folder syncing even that complication will go away. Various subfolders are shared with other actual people too, for the things I work on with other people.

It’s good, it works, I know within a few hours if it’s broken, and I don’t have to think about it.

Which is, for me, the perfect backup system.
Windows 7 has a great backup system also. It will continually pester you until you set up some kind of backup system, and then it will pester you if that stops working.

Neither of them are good enough, though. You can ignore the messages, you can forget to plug in the external drive every so often.

(Downsides mainly involve trusting a third party with your data)

If Ubuntu’s magic personal backup system was cross platform, I’d probably use that (this syncs between three OSs), but trading into a different closed ghetto isn’t something I consider a good idea.

On the 26^th January 2010, when I will be 29, I shall be celebrating this having happened at the Pembury Tavern in Hackney from around 7pm onwards. Please come and join me, for drinking alone is depressing.

I will also be in the same place this the following Sunday.

10 other things Martin Luther King said: