

Ask HN: How do you backup your dev machine - sharjeel

Suppose your dev machine's hard disk crashes, how long would it take you to install everything and get your dev environment back up and running? What strategies do you use in this regard?
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nicholaides
In the past, I had some environment specific dependencies-- installed
libraries and services-- that I couldn't easily backup and wasn't easy to set
up. In this case, I would use a VM to do my development on and back up the VM
image regularly.

Lately, I'm doing Rails development. Using Git, RVM and Bundler makes re-
deploying my development environment a piece of cake, so I just make sure to
have my source code backed up.

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nathanb
My homedir sits on a fast RAID-backed NAS which is backed up nightly. All the
programs I use are installed in ~/opt on this homedir, and all my window
manager settings, program settings, etc are also in my homedir. If my local
drive fails, I can reinstall OpenSUSE, set up NIS to pull my user from the yp
server, set up autofs to grab my homedir and other remote mounts, and have my
entire dev environment all set up in under an hour.

The price to pay for this is that booting and local file access is, on
average, an order of magnitude slower than with an SSD. Even over gigabit
ethernet the latencies are killer. This is not generally a problem once things
are set up, though; my code is on the RAID anyway so the only additional
latency is when some config file falls out of the cache and has to be reread.

(Remember, though: RAID Is Not Backup. My homedir is backed up nightly and
snapshotted hourly.)

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newsrdr
CrashPlan to one of my local boxes (free) and to their online service (small
monthly fee). Runs in the background; restores smoothly; less resource
intensive than Time Machine. Also, run Carbon Copy Cloner periodically to
mirror my main drive, which I can boot directly from when needed.

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bonzoesc
GitHub for work and dev environment configuration stuff, DropBox for 1Password
credentials and public stuff, Time Machine (to a Time Capsule) for my home
directory (except for media and VMWare images), CrashPlan (to their hosted
service) for everything save applications.

I can get running on a new computer in a couple hours; I don't have to hunt
for licenses because they're in 1Password, my editor configuration is on
GitHub, and the applications I use are stored safely at their vendors' sites.

Getting photos and videos back after a failure will probably take days, but
that's what I'm willing to pay for, and it's better than never.

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selectnull
All my source code is in mercurial and subversion repositories, hosted on
servers that are backed up. My Vim configuration is also online.

I can get back to work in time it takes ubuntu to get installed. There would
certainly be things I would lose, but nothing I couldn't live without.

edit: I don't backup my dev machine for the above reasons.

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RobLach
I have dev partition where I keep my libraries and projects. Most of my
projects are on some sort of source control but I also rsync the whole
partition to my dev VPS every morning. The initial sync was some 30+ gb.

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alain94040
Apple's TimeMachine. Has worked perfectly each time I needed to. Back up and
running exactly where I last was, within less than 2 hours. And no manual
intervention, just plug it, let it do its thing, done.

~~~
rawsyntax
I back up with time machine too. I used it once when I had to send my macbook
pro in for maintenance. I just hooked up my timemachine drive to my wife's
macbook pro, and it worked great.

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SoftwareMaven
GitHub/BitBucket for source and configuration. Dropbox for documents, photos,
music, and the like. Added bonus: I have access to everything, everywhere.

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mindcrime
I just rsync the important stuff to an external USB drive. Most of my
important code is stored in an off-site github or google code repository
anyway.

