Over the past month, I’ve had a problem.  Every morning, at around 9am, my server would slow down to a crawl.  I didn’t know what was causing it, but I must admit I was a bit excited.  You see, I could tell that I was going to have a fun time debugging.

Maybe it’s the geek in me, but I LOVE a good debugging session.  It’s like computer detective work.  There’s a problem somewhere and you need to uncover it.  You round up some suspects, test them out, and narrow down the culprit.

Sometimes, your first round of suspects reveals the guilty party, but sometimes you need to dig deeper.  When this happens, you start searching the Internet.  Maybe someone else has had this problem.  Perhaps there is information on how to uncover more clues.  Either way, you are bound to learn something new.

Finally, the root cause is discovered and a fix is devised.  It is put into place and the problem goes away.  Another solution discovered and your skillset is expanded.

At the time of this writing, I’m not sure if I’ve found the problem.  I’ll need to wait at least one more day to find out if the daily slowdowns continue.  If they have, I’ll have found the answer to a very complicated riddle.  If not, I’ll keep at it.  A degree a stubbornness is essential to debugging, but it helps when you enjoy the process.

NOTE: The image above is a combination of Ant by Andy and Cartoon Computer and Desktop by DTRave.  Both images are available from OpenClipArt.org.

Yesterday, B downloaded and installed a new app onto her iPad: The Pickle Weasel App.

When I had a moment, I quickly snagged her iPad to try it out.  I haven’t tried everything yet, but I did test out the drawing games.  I like how you get a partial picture (either Pickle Weasel or something else) and are prompted to complete the drawing.

For example, my first drawing involved making a carrot look drunk.

"I’m not (hic) drunk.  I’m just perflic— perfack— (hic) pefufflely… I’m fine. (hic)"

After the carrot, I drew a pickle pirate.

Looks like he found his gold. ARRR!!

But wait… What happened to the guy who was guarding the gold?

I’m sure he’ll be fine.  He just needs a band-aid.  Or thirty.

For my last picture, I sent Pickle Weasel into space.  He was almost perfectly prepared for his trip.  I think I forgot one thing… I just can’t remember what it is.

As you can see, JC Little – creator of Pickle Weasel and artist-extraordinaire – has nothing to fear from my skills.  I think I’ll keep my day job.  I will, however, have some Pickle Weasel fun on the iPad.  Assuming, that is, that I can get it away from my wife and kids.  (Translation: I shall never get to use it again.)

Yesterday, I wrote about how a DMCA takedown notice was maliciously used to take down legitimate content.  I recommended backing your site to your local computer.  But how do you protect against your computer dying?  After all, your computer might be safe from a DMCA takedown notice, but it encounters all sorts of dangers.  A virus could infect it.  The hard drive might die of old age.  A power surge might fry it.  And if your computer goes belly up, it can mean you lose a lot of data as well (photos, documents, etc).

So what is the best method to avoid digital catastrophe?  I used to burn my data to CD discs.  Since each CD stores 700MB, this can be a good method if you don’t have much data to back up.  You can get a 100 pack of CD-R discs for under $21.

After awhile, I found that I was using too many CDs to easily back up my data so I switched to DVD discs.  Each DVD stores 4.7GB and you can get a 100 pack of DVD discs for under $25.

Of course, as time went on, I found I needed to back up to multiple DVD discs.  This meant that backing up my computer was becoming less and less easy to accomplish.  As it became more difficult, I found I was putting off backing up – a dangerous situation.  Considering that external hard drives are always increasing capacity and dropping in price (you can buy a 3TB hard drive for about $130), I purchased an external hard drive and moved my data there.

Thankfully, when one of my computers experience hard drive failure, my data was safe.  It got me thinking that my external hard drive wasn’t a perfect solution, however.  If that external drive died, it would take all of my data with it.

My solution was to purchase a second 1TB hard drive.  Now, I back our computers up to one drive and back up that drive to the second one.  If one drive dies, the other drive will keep our data safe.  Of course, to make this a near-perfect backup solution, I should move one of the drives "off site" to protect against burglary or fire.

Most recently, I’ve noticed that my 1TB drives are filling up.  It looks like I’m going to have to buy a bigger drive.

What is your backup plan?

NOTE: The links above are Amazon affiliate links.  I will receive a small compensation if you use them to make a purchase.  Also, the "backup" image above is composed of "Cartoon Computer and Desktop" from DTRave and "Hard Disk" by richardomaia.  Both images are available from OpenClipArt.org.

I’ll admit it.  I’m a bit of a pack rat.  It can be very hard for me to part with items, no matter how insignificant they may seem.  Of course, over the years, this means that I’ve accumulated a lot of stuff whose use has long since past.  I’ll often try to push off dealing with it by telling myself that I could sell the items, but deep down I know that putting together a garage sale just doesn’t fit in with my "very little free time" lifestyle.  So eventually I give in and either throw the items away, or find someplace to donate them to.

Still, it pains me to throw something out.  My brain rebels and asks "what if I need this some day?"  Never mind the fact that the item has sat unlooked at for five years and I am not likely to need it ever again.  No, in that moment where the item hovers over the trash bin (or donation bag), it suddenly seems immensely important to my life.

We also have two hard drives that I back our computers up to every so often (at least once a month if not more).  The two drives mirror each other so that we don’t lose data if one goes bad.

What does this have to do with tossing unused items?  Well, my packrat nature extends to the digital realm as well.  I keep every photo (no matter how blurry), every video (even if it is so dark and noisy that it is useless), and every document I’ve created (even if the subject is horribly out of date).

Though I’ve tried to impose some order on the mass of bits and bytes, I haven’t been completely successful.  Our 1 TB drives have less and less free space on them.  Much of that is actual data, but some consists of old files that I don’t really need anymore.  Pretty soon, I might have to upgrade to a 2TB or even 3TB hard drive.  (Probably not a bad idea to move to newer drives anyway as an older drive is more likely to die.)

I should go through the files and folders and get rid of items that I no longer need.  Log files from a decade ago for a website I’m no longer running should be deleted, not buried deep in the folder structure.  Still, just like with physical objects, I feel pained deleting anything.  I will find any reason whatsoever to keep the files as my finger hovers over Delete.  What if someone wants to know just how many visitors I got in May of 2003 on that long-defunct website?  How will I tell them if I delete the log file?!!!

In many ways, getting rid of digital items is much easier than physical items.  Instead of putting them in a trash bag and dragging it to the garbage can, you simply hit the delete button.  Unfortunately, getting past the "well, I can just keep it" rationalization for digital items can be a lot harder.  After all, they are just 1s and 0s on a small hard drive.  They aren’t taking much space and aren’t collecting dust.  So why not keep that blurry photo, long out-dated document, and collection of unneeded log files?

Perhaps some day, I will roll up my sleeves and unclutter my digital space.  Until then, if you’ll excuse me, I think I need to look up prices for bigger hard drives.

This past weekend was a busy one.  It all started on Saturday night.  I came home to find an e-mail in my inbox alerting me to a problem with my dedicated server.  It seems as though TechyDad.com had somehow filled up the partition by growing to 44GB large!

Now, TechyDad.com (along with TheAngelForever and the other sites I run) don’t usually take up that much room.  Not nearly that much.  I began performing some backups and looking at some old databases that might be taking up the extra space.  At first, I couldn’t find anything.

Then, I located it.  The directory where I backed up my mySQL databases was about 39GB large.  As I looked through the directory, I realized what went wrong.  The previous day, I had noticed that my daily backup routine was failing to e-mail me the file.  Thinking that it might be the size of the backups, I altered which databases were backed up.  Then, realizing that I’d need to wait a day to see the results, I set the backup to occur every 15 minutes.

Then, I made my big mistake: I got distracted.  Other matters came up and I forgot all about testing the backups.  But the backups didn’t forget.  They kept going.  Every 15 minutes they would complete another backup.  Every hour, 4 backups would be done.  In no time at all, megabytes of backups turned into gigabytes until the entire disk was flooded.

Thankfully, once the server was running properly again (thanks to plenty of help from a friend of mine), fixing the root cause was easy.  I set the backups to run once a day and I deleted the extra backup files.  Before long, we were back to normal operations.

There are three lessons to be learned here.  First, everyone messes up, including Techy Dads.  Second, backup often… but not too often.  And third, don’t get distracted when you’re doing important work!