My Setup – April 2021

My Setup

I’ve been maintaining an up to date list of what hardware and software I use since I discovered Uses This a few years ago. It used to live as a page in my blog, but I like to maintain an up to date version so I can keep track of exactly what I’m using and how it changes over time. Every couple of years I post a snapshot as a blog post to track the passage of time. This is one of those snapshots.

The hardware I use

Home – I’ve just bought a new desktop computer that mostly consists of components that are fairly new (this is a first for me). Everything feels snappy and fast, and I love it. I also have three monitors (now identical in both size and resolution which pleases me), a mechanical keyboard, a hand-me-down gaming mouse, and all the docks, cables and switches to connect everything together. My personal laptops are both Thinkpads – an x260 for travel and couch-surfing, and an x230 which largely gets used for digitising vinyl and testing software I plan on using on one of my main computers. I also have a variety of Raspberry Pis that fulfil various server and media functions, and a Synology NAS for backups. I’m trying to phase out a lot of my older computers and only use newer machines with SSDs and lots of memory, but it’s hard to let go sometimes.

Work from home – As home, but with a Thinkpad L13 doing the driving. All it requires is a couple of cable switches and toggling the input on two of my monitors. I’d love to do this without crawling under my desk, but that’s a problem for another day.

Work – I’ve not been in my office for a while, but I think I still have something largely similar to my home setup, but with one less screen. I think I’ll be taking my very quiet solar-powered keyboard in as I’ll be sharing an office soon and mechanical keyboards are not conducive to good working relationships.

Travel – I don’t travel right now, but which I did it would be some combination of a Thinkpad, Raspberry Pi Zero, Kindle and phone. I also carry bootable USB versions of Ubuntu and Tails everywhere I go (even places I don’t take a computer). Increasingly my travel hardware also includes a bike and related tools.

The software I use

At work I’m running Windows 10. It largely does the job, but I would like to be able to live without it. Most of my day is spent doing video calls using either Teams or Zoom, but apart from those I tend to use largely the same suite of applications as I do for everything else.

At home (and whilst travelling) It’s mostly Ubuntu with a side order of LibreElec and Raspbian for my Raspberry Pis. I’ve been using the i3 window manager for Ubuntu since early 2020, although I do have Gnome installed on most of my computers as well. The script I use for installing my computers is available on Github and is regularly updated so it generally represents the software I am currently using.

Firefox has always been my main browser, and it surprises me that more people don’t use it. I have a container running with various versions of all the main browsers so that I can test things, but otherwise it’s Firefox all the way.

Other software I use that I feel is somewhat noteworthy includes:

WordPress – All my blogs run on WordPress. I currently maintain a WordPress multisite installation and several stand alone sites.

Atom – A text editor that handles Markdown well, integrates nicely with GitHub, and can preview and export to PDF. I also use Pandoc to convert to PDF, HTML, and/or .docx if required (I try not to use office software until the point I have to share what I’m working on with someone else), and have also started experimenting with using Pandoc to generate slides and ebooks.

Trello – I use this for my to do list, and it’s a good way to visualise the planning and execution of any task based work. It also reminds me when I have forgotten to do something.

Dropbox – Cloud storage and syncing software to ensure I can access everything everywhere.

IFTTT and Buffer – To automate as much as possible. Between them they handle a lot of the seemingly clever things in my digital life, and explain why I seem to be able to post to social media sites at times when I appear to be elsewhere.

Virtualbox and Multipass – Because no-one needs as many physical computers as I had before virtualisation was a thing. Multipass is what I use the most at the moment, and it’s really transformed the way I use containers for anything volatile or requiring increased privacy or security. There are generally at least a couple of containers running on my computer which I can switch to if I need to use a different desktop environment or browser to test something.

Spotify for discovering new music, and Rhythmbox for playing the music I already own. I have 162 days of digital music on my computer, and that’s before we get to all the records and CDs I’ve not got round to digitising yet.

Github for collecting together code that I’ve written and making the way my computers are set up available to other people in case it’s useful. I’ve also increasingly started using private repositories to version control writing and the notes I take at work.

My dream setup

Maybe I’m already living the dream, but the one thing I’d really like is to go back to doing everything on one computer. I also long for reasonably priced mechanical keyboards that are designed for people who just like to type, rather than gamers. Give me RGB and I will activate it, but sometimes I think something a bit more stylish might be more in keeping with the rest of my setup.

My Setup

I’ve been maintaining an up to date list of what hardware and software I use since I discovered Uses This a few years ago. It usually lives as a page on this blog, but as I’ve rewritten 95% of it today then I think it deserves to be a blog post.

The hardware I use

Work – Surface Pro 4, with a Targus dock, two generic monitors and a Microsoft keyboard and mouse.

Home – A setup that looks superficially the same as work, but is older, has more cables, and has an excellent solar powered keyboard that is far superior to the Microsoft one I use at work. It also replaces the Surface Pro with a proper laptop, and adds a server with lots of memory that runs my (internal) WordPress sites and contains a backup of all my music. I also have a variety of small laptops and Raspberry Pis that fulfill various server and media functions, and a Synology NAS for backups. I’m trying to phase out a lot of my older computers and only use newer machines with SSDs and lots of memory, but it’s hard to let go sometimes.

Work from home – As home, but with an additional VM that allows me to connect to a remote desktop. Sometimes I’ll plug the Surface in, but that is only required for certain types of work and it’s far from my default setup now.

Travel – Chromebook, Raspberry Pi Zero, iPad (sometimes), Kindle and phone. Sometimes I’ll travel with my laptop, but that is rare. I also carry bootable USB versions of Ubuntu and Tails everywhere I go (even places I don’t take a computer). Increasingly my travel hardware also includes a bike and related tools.

The software I use

At work I’m running Windows 10. It’s ok, but I would like to be able to live without it.

At home (and whilst travelling) It’s a mix of Ubuntu, iOS, LibreElec ChromeOS and Raspbian (although I also have computers running Windows 10 and Mac OS that are rarely switched on now). Some of this is the legacy of spending the first half of 2018 trying to live with each main desktop OS for at least a month, which I must get round to writing up properly soon.

I use Firefox, Chrome and Safari on a daily basis, although Firefox has always been my main browser.

Other software I use that I feel is somewhat noteworthy includes:

WordPress – All my blogs run on WordPress, including several that are only available on my home network (including an extensive knowledge base containing all IT related things I learn). I currently maintain a WordPress multisite installation and several stand alone sites.

Evernote – I use this on every device I own (largely the web version now though), mostly to take notes in meetings and training sessions, and then to revise/reflect later. A lot of my notes are now photographs of whiteboards and other hand drawn scribbles, which Evernote handles very well.

Atom – A text editor that handles Markdown well, and can preview and export to PDF. I also use Pandoc to convert to PDF, HTML and/or .docx if required (I try not to use office software until the point I have to share what I’m working on with someone else).

Trello – I use this for my to do list, and it’s a good way to visualise the planning and execution of any task based work.

Dropbox – Cloud storage and syncing software to ensure I can access everything everywhere. I also use the text editor on the Dropbox mobile app to edit on the move.

Virtualbox – Because no-one needs as many physical computers as I had before virtualisation was a thing.

Spotify for discovering new music, and Rhythmbox for playing the music I already own.

My dream setup

Maybe I’m already living the dream, but the one thing I’d really like is to go back to doing everything on one computer (ideally running Ubuntu). That was possible 10 years ago, and I’m sad that it doesn’t seem possible today. I also yearn to live the life of a nomad, with just a bike, a change of clothes, and a tiny laptop to my name.

An updated guide to using Pandoc for document conversion

I wrote about Pandoc last year, but I’m using it more and more and I’ve found myself editing the original post a fair few times. This is the updated 2016 version that gathers together useful commands I’ve learned so far.

Last year I found myself needing to do a lot of document conversion, and maintaining documentation that needs to be available in a variety of formats (HTML, Word documents, Markdown and PDF). My tool of choice for this sort of thing is Pandoc, which is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, although most of my usage so far has been on Linux and Mac OS X (it’s a command line package that can output to Dropbox, so it doesn’t matter where it runs really).

There are instructions for installing Pandoc on quite a few platforms. I’ve found that following these is generally enough, although it’s worth installing the latest version of the .deb packages rather than the one in the repositories.

On Debian/Ubuntu I also add the texlive-latex-extra package, but that’s largely because it gives me a specific Beamer theme I like to use.

If you’re using Pandoc on Mac OS X there is one more command you’ll need to issue prior to the first time you want to create a PDF file:

sudo ln -s /Library/TeX/texbin/pdflatex /usr/local/bin/

This will ensure Pandoc knows where to find pdflatex. If this step isn’t followed then you’ll likely get an error message along the lines of pandoc: pdflatex not found. pdflatex is needed for pdf output.

Pandoc works for me because I write everything in markdown, and Pandoc is great at taking markdown and converting it into almost anything else. It’s also good if you need to create a PDF, a Word document and a slide show from the same document. The syntax is fairly simple for most document types:

For example:

pandoc input.md -s -o output.docx
pandoc input.md -s -o output.html
pandoc input.md -s -o output.epub

Conversion to PDF works the same, although I’m not a fan of wide margins, so I tweak it slightly:

pandoc -V geometry:margin=1in input.md -s -o output.pdf

For a Beamer slide show you’ll need something like:

pandoc -t beamer input.md -V theme:metropolis -o output.pdf

Pandoc does a lot more, but the documentation is great, and the commands above should be enough to get you started. If you want to try out the functionality in a web browser then http://pandoc.org/try/ should be able to handle most types of conversions.

Software I use

Software I use that I feel is somewhat noteworthy includes:

Evernote – I use this on every device I own, mostly to take notes in meetings and training sessions, and then to revise/reflect later. A lot of my notes are now photographs of whiteboards, which Evernote handles very well.
Atom – A text editor that handles Markdown well, and can preview and export to PDF. This pretty much handles all of my writing/blogging work within one application. I’m currently writing this post in Atom. I also use Pandoc to convert to PDF, HTML and/or .docx if required.
Trello – I’ve just started using this for my to do list, and it’s a good way to visualise the planning and execution of any task based work.
Keynote – For presentations. I wouldn’t say I’m a power user, but I can throw together a half decent presentation now.
Dropbox – Cloud storage and synching software to ensure I can access everything everywhere.
IFTTT and Buffer – To automate as much as possible. Between them they handle a lot of the seemingly clever things in my digital life, and explain why I seem to be able to post to social media sites at times when I appear to be elsewhere.
NVivo – As a lot of the data I work with is words rather than numbers this is proving somewhat invaluable. I use the Mac version, but should get round to exploring the Windows version soon as I understand it has some different features.
Virtualbox – Because no-one needs as many physical computers as I had before virtualisation was a thing.

I’m always happy to talk about any of this software and how I use it to be productive.

A few words about IT literacy

When I’m recruiting new IT staff one of the things I always look for is how computer literate they are. It’s a hard thing to work out, as it’s usually a mixture of what they know and what they have done in the past, but also how they think and how inspired they are by technology. I also try and think back 10 years, to when I was the person on the other side of the desk who was trying to blag that a whole load of dabbling with things at home was enough experience to allow me to support some fairly important systems in a large University.

I sometimes get asked what advice I’d give someone wanting to get into an entry level IT role when they don’t have any experience. I sometimes think that’s the wrong question, because everyone has IT experience, and also the opportunity to gain experience without leaving the comfort of their own bedroom. I thought it might be worth expanding on what I mean by that, and what sort of things would impress me if I saw them on an application form or heard them in an interview. I’d also say that this list is probably a good starting point for anyone who wants to learn more about IT in general.

Use more than one operating system (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) and learn the skills common to all of them

There is a viewpoint that Microsoft have won the OS war, and that IT professionals should concentrate on familiarising themselves with Windows and MS Office because that is what everyone uses. I don’t share that viewpoint, but I do think that it’s important to use the software that other people are using, because if you want to be able to support that software then you need to know how it works. I think it’s essential to have an overview of all the main operating systems, and I’m particularly interested in people who run more than one, or who have changed their primary operating system and can articulate their reasons why. It suggests they have thought about what they want their computer to do, and that they have considered the financial, ethical and functional criteria that contribute to the decision as to what OS to use.

For instance, my current main OS is Mac OS X. I started to switch from Ubuntu at the end of 2010 in order to better understand an OS I was being asked to implement and be an advocate for in my workplace. The switch took a few months, but by mid 2011 all of my regularly used machines were Macs. I do however maintain machines running Ubuntu and Debian, and am now doing more Linux based work which may warrant a partial switch back at some point. I like using Macs because of the quality of the hardware and software, and that fact that everything generally just works. I dislike them because of the lack of freedom, and the number of decisions about how I use my computer that seem to have been taken away from me. I like using Linux because I can customise my computer to do exactly what I need it to do at no cost to myself or my employer, but I dislike the fact it requires a lot of maintenance, and also that I can’t use some software I require to do my job and therefore need to also maintain a Windows machine or a Mac anyway. I also still maintain that the 11″ Macbook Air is the best computer ever made, and until I find something better then I want to continue using one.

What I find about using multiple operating systems (and I’d include Windows in this) is that once you use more than one, you realise they all have things in common, and once you start to spot those patterns then it makes it easier to deal with unfamiliar operating systems. Windows 8 doesn’t faze me in the slightest because I remember the Mac OS9 –> OS X shift, and also the move from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 (and Unity, and a load of other desktops). The key for me is getting to a point where the desktop doesn’t get in the way of being productive, and that comes through regular use.

As an aside, I’ve switched my main OS a few times, and also maintained two in parallel for quite a while. I was a (classic) Mac OS user until my Mac became too old, and then had a brief (maybe a year) period of using mainly Windows. I switched to Debian in late 2004, and then Ubuntu from 2005. I got another (refurbished) Mac in 2006 and maintained OS X and Ubuntu in parallel until 2009 where I found I was doing everything in Ubuntu and hardly ever turned my Mac on (to be fair, it was very old at this point). I then switched back to OS X in 2011 as detailed above.

What I’ve noticed is that people who have only ever used one OS are often scared of all the other ones, and the easiest way to get over that is to experiment with them. Linux is free, and will install on almost anything, and if you’re in the UK then you can pick up a decent refurbished Thinkpad from around £200 from http://www.refreshedbyus.com/, or a budget desktop without an OS from http://www.ebuyer.com/ for around the same price. Windows machines are also coming down in price every year, and it’s now affordable to maintain more than one machine in ways that it wasn’t 10 or even 5 years ago. And of course virtualisation is now easier than ever (but I’ll mention more about this later on).

Use more than one version of each operating system (or at least know how to use them)

Something else I’ve noticed (especially with people who grew up with Windows XP) is that it’s not just trying another OS that is scary, but moving to a new version of the same OS. It’s certainly worth being familiar with the last couple of versions of anything you’re using and supporting, and having an overview of what the upgrade path would be for someone using something obsolete and unsupported like Windows XP.

I also think that if you’re running (or experimenting with) Linux, then it’s worth trying out at least a couple of desktop environments to see what works for you (and for your computer). I’ve got machines running Gnome 3 (Debian), XFCE (Debian & Xubuntu) and Unity (Ubuntu). None of them are perfect, but all of them allow me to understand the similarities and differences of modern desktop operating systems.

If you use several different operating systems it becomes really easy to see how the user interfaces and features of one will influence another. And once you start to make those connections then it’s fairly straightforward to approach a new operating system or desktop environment and make it work well enough for you to help someone who is having difficulties with it.

Use at least two browsers

If you’re supporting software, then you’re likely supporting browser-based software, and knowing how that software behaves in all of the main web browsers is something you need to be up to speed with. I find the best way to do that is to use at least three browsers regularly, and for me that means Firefox and/or Chrome on my computers, and Safari for my iOS devices. I test everything on all three, and on other browsers as well (although if I’m asked to test things it’s usually because they have only been tested on Windows and someone wants the non-Windows perspective).

As with operating systems, if you use multiple browsers then you are unlikely to be surprised or significantly slowed down when a new browser grabs a decent slice of the market share like Chrome did a few years back. It also make it easier to switch your main browser if the one you’re using start to get slow and bloated, or no longer includes features that you really need.

Install a virtualisation tool and set up a new VM

I said I’d come back to this one, because I think it deserves a section to itself. Virtualisation software has been such a game-changer for me, because it has allowed me to continue using multiple operating systems without having to maintain a physical computer for each one. By using software such as https://www.virtualbox.org/ it’s possible to run multiple operating systems on the same machine, and also to set up virtual web servers to experiment with blogging software, wikis, and other CMS related things. I’m currently doing a lot of this sort of thing at work, and it’s great to be able to have virtual servers that are backed up and snapshotted so I can roll them back to the point just before I broke something. Once you’ve developed like this then you’ll never go back, and it will teach you all sorts of skills that are directly applicable to sysadmin work, as well as development and IT support.

Virtualisation is also great for those situations where you can do 90% of your work in one OS, but need to switch to another one for one or two specific tasks. The guest machine is only using resources when it’s on, and you may find that most of the time you don’t even need to boot it.

Know how to back up your data, and where all copies of your data are

I blog quite regularly about how I back up data, but it’s always worth writing about, as I find that things change as I stumble upon new products. My current plan is based on the 3/2/1 rule, with three copies of everything, on two types of media, with (at least) one remote copy. I use Time Machine, Crashplan and Carbon Copy Cloner to back up copies of my whole computer, and Dropbox, Google Drive and iCloud to ensure that files I use regularly are available on any computer I use.

How it generally works is that any machine that stays in one place (or mainly stays in one place like my heaviest laptop) backs up nightly (via Carbon Copy Cloner) to an external hard drive. I also have a portable hard drive that I back up to weekly with a bootable copy of the two machines where I regularly create data (as opposed to consume it). When I’m not backing up to it, this drive is kept in a different physical location to the machines it is backing up. Additionally, all my music is in iTunes Match, my photos are on two different NAS drives, all my portable computers back up to another machine via Crashplan and/or Time Machine, and everything text based I’m currently working on will exist in either Evernote, Dropbox or Google Drive, depending on what it is and who else needs to access it.

I’ve also started running some experiments with Bit Torrent Sync – maintaining a small directory of emergency music and freely available ebooks which I sync between all of my machines, and I also carry around an encrypted USB drive on my keyring which contains a lot of the same sort of stuff, as well as the installer for the latest version of Mac OS X, plus recent disk images of Ubuntu and Debian.

I test my backups monthly (sometimes more than monthly), including booting all the full disk clones to make sure they actually boot. I think this is important. I also try and replace my backup drives every couple of years to ensure that I’m not backing up to something that is likely to fail soon.

Know how to upgrade/replace key parts of your computer

This is something I think is so important, but it seems to be a dying art. Not that I’m surprised though, because Apple (and to a lesser extent other manufacturers) seem to be moving towards a world where individual parts of a computer are not upgradeable, and instead you just buy a new computer when it wears out or gets slow. So many older computers could benefit from a solid state hard drive (SSD) or some more memory, and both of these upgrades will make an old computer feel like a new one. There are plenty of people who will fit parts for you, but this will cost you, and often these are upgrades you can do yourself. Since I’ve been working with technology I’ve upgraded most of my machines (even my Macbook Air), but I do worry that the next computer I buy is likely to be less upgradable than the last.

I learned about computer hardware through buying an old machine from eBay and experimenting with it. I replaced the memory, and the power supply and the hard drive, and I’ve still got it sat in the shed 10 years later. There are still plenty of machines out there that you can replace pretty much everything in, and building a PC from scratch is still very much a rite of passage for anyone who is interested in hardware.

Know how to reinstall the OS on your computer

Long gone are the days where operating systems would not be upgraded for years. We’re now in a world where things change at least every 6-12 months, and it’s important that the operating system on your computer is up to date and receiving security updates regularly. Updating software is relatively straightforward on any computer, and we do seem to be moving towards the concept of an app store, where the OS is just another app to be upgraded when a new version comes out. Whatever you’re running, it’s a good idea to know how to upgrade the software on your computer, and also how to reinstall it from scratch. These are things that you can pay someone to do, but you never know where and when computer faults will happen, and the night before a deadline or while you’re overseas are not good times to learn about reinstalling operating systems.

Use more than one office suite, and learn the skills common to all of them

A big part of IT support is knowing about what the people you support are actually using. Arcane terminal commands and knowledge of compiling software will get you nowhere if you are supporting people who largely work with documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Particularly in a corporate or academic environment, knowing about a variety of office suites will serve you well, and it’s important to stay up to date so that you’re not surprised by changes to user interfaces. This is one area of IT that can be tricky to stay up to date with if you don’t use this software yourself, and as someone who writes in a text editor, and only really uses Word for specific work-based tasks, I’m probably not the best person to advise on it. Although the fact that I use Keynote for presentations and Excel for serious data manipulation does suggest I can at least use some of more than one office suite. I also like Libre Office a lot, and think it’s one of the most underrated pieces of software out there.

As with operating systems and browsers, there is so much feature-bleed with office software that once you have used a couple of different versions then you start to see how they all do roughly the same thing under the hood. This is also a class of software where manufacturers love to change the UI radically between versions, so be prepared to relearn menus over and over again. Of course, if you use keyboard shortcuts then there should be less learning to do.

Which brings me nicely on to keyboard shortcuts.

Learn keyboard shortcuts

On my main desktop computer I have a solar powered keyboard, which means that even in the cloudy climate of the UK I can pretty much guarantee that it will work. The same can’t be said of my wireless mouse, which is always running out of power and needing newly charged batteries. That doesn’t bother me as much as it might do though, as I’m fairly keyboard-shortcut-literate, and can do most of what I need to do without picking up the mouse. Not only can knowing these get you out of a fix if your mouse or trackpad stops working, but it’s a lot quicker to open or save a file using the keyboard when your hands are already touching the keyboard to type. It’s also a lot better on your wrists, and will make you look like you know what you are doing with your computer. It’s one thing I always look for when I’m trying to judge how computer-literate someone is, and it is usually a very good indicator.

A list of keyboard shortcuts for Mac OS X can be found at https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT201236. Some of these will work on other operating systems, but I’m sure there are similar lists elsewhere (Ubuntu even has one on the screen the first time you launch the Unity desktop).

Host a website

In the days of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and a thousand other readily available web-based content sites, it’s rare to find someone to doesn’t have some sort of web presence. When I started out with computers it was harder to get content online, and I had to learn a fair bit of HTML just to have a simple home page, whereas now I can just create an account online in a few minutes. Despite the fact that it’s so easy, I still think it’s valuable to know how the nuts and bolts work, and how to set up your own website that you host and control yourself. My first site was hand crafted HTML, and my current website is a self-hosted WordPress blog (cloud hosted now, but originally hosted on a server under the desk in my office).

I think it’s still valuable to know how to configure a web server (I use LAMP – Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), and install a CMS like WordPress on it. Even if you don’t use it for your main blog it is something you might be asked to do one day, and it’s a skills set that I’ve found myself using over and over again (and is in fact something I’m working on professionally right now).

Learn a programming language (or two)

I’m not a programmer, but I do know a little bit of HTML, CSS and PHP. Programming languages are not required for IT support, but as programming is largely about problem solving then there are a lot of transferable skills. Programming is also useful for solving in-house problems that your support tools can’t do (like writing a password generator or something to convert proprietary mailbox formats to something more open – both requirements I’ve come across in my own team).

Learning some basic scripting is also a good idea, and a familiarity with shell scripting and Windows powershell scripts is never going to be wasted time and effort.

Know what you can do and what you can’t do

And finally, this. It’s all very well to look and sound impressive by stretching your IT skills and knowledge to the extreme, but it’s important to be honest with yourself about what you can and can’t do, and which of your theories are backed up by practical experience. Experiments are all very well in the comfort of your own home, but when you’re dealing with other people’s computers and data then ensure you know what you are doing and when to ask for help and guidance.

New additions to my back up plan

I’ve been using Dropbox, Carbon Copy Cloner, iCloud, iTunes Match, Time Machine, Google Drive and Crashplan as part of my back up plan for a while. Recently I also added OneDrive and Copy, because they both give me a decent amount of cloud storage, and in the case of Copy it’s a decent interface to store large PDF files (such as downloads of Mac Format and Linux Format) that are too large for the Kindle app to deal with.

Today I also started experimenting with BitTorrent Sync. It’s not cloud storage, but it will mirror directories between multiple computers, and is only limited by disk space and the speed of my local network. I’ve not got much further than installing the client yet, but will write more about how it works if it proves to be interesting/useful.

What’s your backup plan?

This week at work we have been working on a video to promote backing up data. The tagline is “what’s your backup plan?” – which has made me think about how I back up my data, and how well what I actually do measures up to what we recommend.

The basic message is that for a file to be backed up, it needs to exist in an identical version in more than one location (and ideally three locations, one of which is physically separate from the actual machine the data is created on). I do try and adhere to this, although I think I’m still a step away from being as safe as I’d like.

I have two basic backup strategies. One is to ensure that any file I edit exists in some sort of cloud storage system (usually Dropbox, iCloud or Evernote). The other is to ensure that any computer I create data on is backed up regularly using at least two different methods/products. The combination of these two systems, plus the fact I use quite a few computers, ensures I always have several copies of everything, and can access historical copies of my data and bootable clones of my whole computer in almost all scenarios.

Most of this is now automated, in that all my machines back up locally through Time Machine on an hourly basis, and once a day to a bootable clone created using Carbon Copy Cloner. This works fine providing my house doesn’t burn down. I also back up my main home and work computers once a week to a disk that I keep with my at all times, but this has to be done manually, which isn’t ideal.

My iOS devices back up to iCloud, but also back up to my computer every time they are plugged in (with the backups then being themselves backed up as part of my other backups). I don’t have any unique data on them (at least not for long), but I still think it’s worth being able to restore them quickly and to have a second (and sometimes third) copy of all my apps.

So that’s my backup plan. It’s not perfect, but it covers most of the bases.

Backing up and syncing data

I was having a conversation recently about backups, and how Dropbox is great for ensuring that you don’t lose valuable files. However, the free version of Dropbox can only handle a maximum of 8Gb, and once you start looking at music and photographs then I think most of us would probably need a paid Dropbox account to make this method worthwhile.

Alas, the paid Dropbox accounts only come in 50 or 100Gb denominations, and can come across as quite pricey. I think there’s certainly a market for smaller and cheaper paid options, and I think that a 20Gb account at a reasonable price would get a lot of interest.

But yes, I digress. I though what would be useful (for me at least) would be to detail how I back up my data, and also how I sync it between the various machines I use (which is part of the same process for me).

I’m a great fan of Dropbox, and I use it to sync data between my machines and to collaborate with people on all sorts of work and non-work projects. What I keep in Dropbox is anything that might change, or that I will need to access on all my computers. This largely boils down to:

Work related documents that I need to share or collaborate on with my co-worker
Anything else I’m collaborating on
Anything that is an editable file (generally anything created with OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Office)
Documents I’m currently writing (usually as plain text files, unless they are collaborations)
PDFs of books/documents I’m currently reading
Useful phone numbers, next of kin details etc.

I also sync my browsing history and bookmarks through Firefox Sync, meaning that on a new/reinstalled computer I just need to install two applications and I can have a fair approximation of my most useful data within a few minutes, regardless of what operating system I’m using.

For actual backups I have a 2Tb NAS (Network attached storage) that backs up my Ubuntu laptop via DejaDup, and my Mac via Time Machine. All my other computers just reply on Dropbox and Firefox sync. I also maintain a few directories available to either just myself or to everyone on our home network. These are things I might want access to occasionally on multiple machines, but that are too weighty for Dropbox:

Photographs
Books
Music
Videos
Linux disc images
My .virtualbox file containing my virtual web server and a few other things

These total about 200 Gb, and I can access them from anywhere on our network (and further afield if I wished to configure the NAS to do so, which I don’t). Each of these items exists on one of my other computers already, but the NAS represents a repository of everything, and would be the one thing I’d save in a fire to ensure I had at least one copy of everything that was important.

I also have a 500Gb portable hard drive that I manually back up things to sometimes, but that I largely use when I’m away from home and want access to more movies and music that I can sensibly fit on my netbook.

I used to have a very complicated email backup system, but since I switched to Google Apps then I tend to let Google do most of the work and just back up my mailbox as part of my DejaDup/Time Machine backups. I also dump a copy of all my useful documents into Google Docs occasionally, and use it largely for real-time collaboration (which Dropbox can’t really handle).

So yes, that’s about it I think. I wouldn’t recommend this for everyone, but it certainly seems to be working for me at the moment.

My first stab at self-interview

In my last post I mentioned The Setup. This is my attempt to answer the questions.

Who are you and what do you do?

I’m Andy, and I work for IT Services at the University of Birmingham in a Service Desk management/development role. In my spare time I listen to and write about music, dabble in free and open source software (mainly Ubuntu), and am sporadically involved in the Isles of Darkness live action roleplay society.

What hardware are you using?

At work everything is largely generic. I have a Dell desktop that is coming to the end of its life, but that is still more than capable of dealing with most of my emailing and calendaring needs. It is plugged into a 17″ Sony monitor that has been with me for about 4 years now, and which I keep holding on to as it is one of the few desktop monitors I’ve used that doesn’t give me a headache after hours of staring at it (yes, I know a new monitor and more breaks might be a more sensible plan).

Most of my actual work is done on an (again) fairly generic Fujitsu Siemens laptop, which I started using a couple of years ago, and which allows me to type for hours without my wrists hurting. I wouldn’t recommend this laptop above any other, but it does the job.

At home I have pretty much left desktop computers behind. My main workstation is a Sony Vaio VGN-NS10l (dual core, 4Gb ram), which I bought a couple of years ago and deals with anything I throw at it. I’ve also got a 10″ Dell Inspiron Mini, which goes everywhere with me, and is increasingly becoming the computer I do most of my web browsing, email and writing on. My backup machines are a G4 iBook and a EeePC 701, and we’ve also got another Mac and a Wii plugged into the TV downstairs. My wife has several other computers which I’ll not mention here except to say that we have more computers than there are rooms in our house (by quite a lot). And that’s not counting the ones that are propping open doors or otherwise not really being used for anything productive any longer.

And what software?

Work is a mix of Windows XP (desktop) and Ubuntu 10.04 (laptop). In Windows I largely use Outlook for email and calendaring, office communicator for collaboration, and very little else. In Linux I use Firefox for browsing (with Chrome and Epiphany for testing), Evolution for email, Empathy and Dropbox for collaboration, OpenOffice.org for creating documents and spreadsheets, and (generally) Bluefish for coding. Recently I’ve been using GIMP a lot too, and have also been dabbling with a few command-line image conversion tools. I also maintain several instances of Mediawiki, as well as a full LAMP environment for development, and use google calendar to plan and maintain my work-life balance.

At home both of my laptops are running the latest version of Ubuntu, which I’ve used as my primary OS since 2005. I use largely the same software as I use at work, although I’ve recently reverted to using gedit for writing blog posts and other bits of text, and only venturing into OpenOffice when I want to make something available to other people. Home is also where I spend a lot of time playing with WordPress and Virtualbox, and where I use Rhythmbox to listen to music (and Last.fm to catalogue what I’m listening to). I’ve also recently started using Google Reader, and I now don’t know how I coped without it.

My Macs run a very stripped down version of Leopard, and really only get used for iTunes and other media related things now (although I’d still use my iBook as my main portable computer if it weighed a little less). They also run Dropbox (as does every computer I own), and I’ve been syncing all my important files between all my machines for a couple of years now. I still can’t understand why more people don’t do this, and I’ve lost count of the number of times this one piece of software has got me out of a hole.

What would be your dream setup?

I change my mind about my ideal working environment a lot, but what I basically want is a laptop that is thin, light and stylish, and that can perform at the level where I could use it as my only computer (including storing 100gb of music). The nearest thing I’ve come across is the 13″ Macbook Pro, although I’d be happier with something the size and weight of my 10″ Dell Mini with all the power and stylishness of the Macbook Pro. Being able to run OS X and Ubuntu at the same time would also be great.

Of course, having used an iPad for the first time recently, I’d probably have to add that to my wish list, just because it’s a really stylish and functional piece of kit.

I also wonder if having a desktop computer with two large monitors would make me more productive. I have a feeling that most of what I do can be achieved on a single small screen, but it would be nice to have the opportunity to experiment with these things.

Question format borrowed from The Setup under the Attribution-Share Alike license.

Dropbox for Mandriva 2009 and 2009.1

This should work on any recent version of Mandriva, but specifically on 2009 (current) and 2009.1 (cooker).

So far so good, but as always, your mileage may vary. It’s the first one I’ve built on a VM (my physical build machine died), but it installed fine on my EeePC, so hopefully all will be well.