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p. Continuing on the theme of paranoia, I’ve been paying serious—and very overdue—attention to backing up my MovableType installation and entries[1]. I’ve been really bad at remembering to export and backup the entries, and the thought that I could—at any moment—lose weeks of considered (and ill-considered) entries and comments started to really bother me.

p. I did a search on the MovableType forums for an automated solution, and came upon “this brilliant solution”:http://www.virtualvenus.org/archives/0309/createanexport_blog.php by “girlie”:http://www.thegirliematters.com/ at Virtual Venus. You can read the full story if you follow the link, but it involves setting up a new blog with index files for each blog you want to back up, which writes a text file in the export format. There’s a rebuilding script which you can schedule with cron, and I’ve also set up a cron script running from my own machine to suck the backed-up files off the server and on to my computer using curl—just in case the server bursts into flames, or something. I did say that I was feeling a bit paranoid.

p. Girlie also has a cunning plan “here”:http://www.thegirliematters.com/tips/archives/0309/configurationlistingwithphpand_mysql.php to allow you to view your configuration settings and save them to a file too. Finally, I now have my templates linked to external files (which I’ll also back up), so I should be ready for any self-inflicted disaster.

fn1. It must be the time of year, or something. In times gone by, people would have carefully preserved and stored their food at this time of year for the hard, lean season ahead. Perhaps my urge to back up my computer is a modern echo of this folk memory.

p. I’ve just started footling about with [“CVS”:http://www.cvshome.org/], so I was very interested in “this article”:http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=5976 by Joey Hess about storing his whole home directory in CVS. I don’t think that going to those kinds of extremes would help me a great deal—partly because I have to write a lot of documents in binary formats, so I wouldn’t get the benefits of diff and so forth. In fact, I’m a bit hazy on whether CVS can deal with binary format files at all. No doubt someone will enlighten me…

p. Nevertheless, it’s quite inspiring, and I can see that the benefits would be enormous. I’ve often had the experience of binning some document, only to find (amid much grinding of teeth and tearing of hair) that I needed it a few weeks later, and I have a lot of trouble keeping track of all the numerous revisions of co-authored papers. It would be fantastic to be able to see the differences between the current version and the one three revisions back in a clearer and more reliable way than Word allows—not to mention the hideous privacy problems involved with revision tracking in Word. I certainly want to start using CVS consistently with my web sites, so that when I break something disastrously while tinkering (and I do mean ‘when’ rather than ‘if’), I can roll back to the last good version fairly easily. I’ve got to do some serious studying of “this article(CVS Version Control for Web Site Projects)”:http://www.durak.org/cvswebsites/ to work out the best way of doing it.