You know it's time to backup your hard-drive ...

... when it starts to make audible "clicking" sounds every 10 seconds.

So, I figure, this is a good time for a backup and for me to finally document the procedures I'm using to clone and backup my hard-drive ... (1) to archive them for posterity (2) to make this easier the next time I need to do a backup and (3) to save some others from having to spend time figuring it out on their own.

So I have three backup options to choose from:

(1) Clonezilla: device-device disk/partition to disk/partition
Disk to disk image using Clonezilla. Since this is a manual process I only do this every month or so. However, this is the thing that will save you when your hard-drive crashes and you need to get back up and running as quickly as possibly. Cloning to a drive with the same specs as your working drive will allow you to swap out the broken drive and swap in the cloned drive without losing a beat. I just realized that I need a third internal drive to write the disk-to-disk image in order to keep one disk that will always work (i.e. what happens if both drives end up in the drink during the backup process).

Here's the process for running a Clonezilla disk-to-disk image (screenshots would be nice, but this is all done via CD so I'm not sure if it's possible without a camera)

1. Insert Clonezilla CD
2. Reboot System
3. Answer the following questions
4. clonezilla> Which language do you prefer? English
5. clonezilla> Policy for handling keymaps: Don't touch the keymap
6. clonezilla> Choose the mode: Start Clonezilla
7. clonezilla> Choose the mode: device-device disk/partition to disk/partition
8. clonezilla> Choose the mode: disk_to_local_disk
9. clonezilla> Choose the local disk as source: sda 200GB Hitachi ...
10. clonezilla> Choose the local disk as target: sdb 100GB Storage
11. clonezilla> Set advanced parameters: -g-auto Reinstall grub to target harddisk boot sector
12. clonezilla> Set advanced parameters: Use the partition table from source disk
13. And finally ... answer the following paranoid, "just watching your back" questions ... I love this part.
    
14. clonezilla> Are you sure you want to continue? y
    
15. clonezilla> Are you sure you want to continue? If you go on, the original data exist in the target device will be destroyed!!! Be careful!! Are you sure? y
16. clonezilla> Do you want to clone the boot loader to sdb? y
17. clonezilla> Now we will start to clone data to target machine ... Are you sure you want to continue? y
18. Now go get some coffee or a beer (i.e. Bell's Two Hearted Ale or Dogfish Head 60 Minute IPA)
    
19. Relax as your life gets cloned over to another hard-drive.
    

(2) device-image disk/partition to/from image
This is another option and one that I will likely incorporate soon, just so that I always have an extra image lying around in case something goes terribly wrong with the entire universe and this one external drive is the only thing that is spared. For this option, you basically just create the same image as the disk-to-disk image, but copy it to an external hard-drive (any old backup drive), rather than having to buy an exact replica of your current hard drive. This option just gives you a bit more piece of mind and might save you a few bucks in the short-term (you don't have to buy that second internal drive). But once your current drive goes bad (and it will), you'll need to go out and buy that second drive anyway. This just means that your recovery process will take a little longer (i.e. the amount of time it takes amazon to ship you that new drive).

I want to use all three options (just to have an image lying around in case ... yes ... something goes terribly wrong with the universe). However I still haven't adopted this approach (probably because my 500GB external hard-drive is full of Acronis' crappy backups. I hate Acronis, in case I've never mentioned it before. I'll explain in a different post, but essentially it comes down to "four months", which is the time that elapsed between when I sent in an email request to their tech support and when I received a response. If that had happened once, I would have given them a pass. But it's happened twice and I still haven't heard back from them after my last response (sometime in February 2009). For the record, Acronis is a company I want to love (they are from Burlington, MA) ... but I just can't. And until they get back to me with an apology for their terrible tech support, I will continue to give them mean looks when I pass them in the hallway.

(3) Daily backups with Ubuntu sbackup
Daily backup using sbackup (which I just found out was a Google Summer of Code project from 2005). This is going to be the next weapon I add to the backup arsenal, right after I finish my most recent disk-to-disk image.

Conclusion
So I need to get a new external hard-drive. Does anyone have any recommendations regarding backups? I'm thinking about going with a deal from Amazon that includes:

• Western Digital My Book 1TB USB
• Western Digital My Passport 320 GB USB

However, I'd love a recommendation. CNET and PCWorld have some recommendations, but nothing looked all that impressive.

And does anyone out there make backups of their backups? I'm thinking about getting an external drive with a few TB of space in order to provide some redundancy in case one of the backup drives fail. So would love some suggestions on that front too.

Update: OpenMRS Test-a-Thon (May 16 - 17)

What the heck is the OpenMRS Test-a-Thon?
The OpenMRS Test-a-Thon is a code-a-thon event that allows people to collaboratively increase and improve our testing process in order to make the OpenMRS platform a more stable and robust piece of software (click here for more details).

When is it going down?
We'll be starting at noon (EDT) on Saturday, May 16 and ending at noon (EDT) on Sunday, May 17. You can come and go as you wish. I'll be hanging out in our IRC Channel all day Saturday and will be taking in a feature film on Saturday night (9 - 11pm CDT). So no pressure. Come inside, submit yourself a junit test, and then go back out and finish your Saturday chores.

Where is the event going to take place?
The test-a-thon will take place online. You can join us on the OpenMRS IRC Channel. Contact me via Skype (jmiranda) or on the IRC channel to discuss how you might be able to help out.


Who can participate?
Anyone. Developers, implementers, supporters, documenters ... people who are bored.

Who should participate?
Everyone.

Why should you participate?
Because ...

• You love OpenMRS.
• You want to learn about test driven develement (TDD).
  
• You want to learn about behavior driven development (BDD).
• You want to learn about cool unit testing frameworks (i.e. JUnit).
• You want to learn about cool web testing frameworks (Selenium).
  
• You want to learn about continuous integration.
  
• You want to write documentation for OpenMRS.
• You want to meet the team.
  
• You want to make Ben Wolfe happy.
• You want to win a prize.
• You have nothing better to do on a Saturday.
  

How can I participate in this once in a lifetime (more like bi-annual) event?
You can head over to the OpenMRS wiki for more details.

Thank you,

The OpenMRS Team

Warning: DO NOT INSTALL Subclipse 1.6 for Eclipse 3.4.x

The Problem
Save yourself a few days of headache ... don't do it! More details to come.

So Mike (mseaton) and I recently upgraded to Eclipse 3.4.2 because of some messed up issues with JSP/XML Validation within Eclipse 3.4. We also both installed Subclipse 1.6 thinking it would bring us joy. Three days later, with lots of back-and-forth collaboration on a project that we have sitting in Subversion, we've experienced nothing but headaches. When he's committed code to the repository, I'll update my working copy only to find that the only changes that come through are ones that are non-conflicting. So when I then try to commit my changes, I get warnings that my working copy is not up-to-date. I think the problem might be the fact that the new "SVN Update to HEAD" feature does not do a --force (but that's just a hunch). I just finished reverting my Eclipse upgrade to Subclipse 1.6 and have successfully reinstalled Subclipse 1.4.7.

Now the issue is that Subclipse 1.6 (which uses Subversion 1.6 wc format) has upgraded all of my working copy metadata to Subversion 1.6. Installing Subclipse 1.4.7 (which uses Subversion 1.4 wc format) means that I cannot use Subclipse on my currently checked out code. Since I have about 30+ projects checked out, this is kind of a problem. I can't waste hours

Here's the error you'll get when

root@jmiranda-laptop:~/Workspace/module-birtreport# svn diff
svn: This client is too old to work with working copy '.'. You need
to get a newer Subversion client, or to downgrade this working copy.
See http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#working-copy-format-change
for details.


So thankfully, the subversion folks have a downgrade script:

http://subversion.tigris.org/faq.html#working-copy-format-change


Download the script and run the following command:

root@jmiranda-laptop:~/Workspace# python change-svn-wc-format.py module-birtreport --force --verbose 1.5
Converted WC at 'module-birtreport' into format 9 for Subversion 1.5


Now, at least, I can run svn commands on that directory.

root@jmiranda-laptop:~/Workspace/module-birtreport# svn diff
Index: .project
===================================================================
--- .project (revision 7566)
+++ .project (working copy)
@@ -1,18 +1,18 @@
...

However, when I open Eclipse I can no longer see the very helpful icon overlays on top of files that are "unchanged" or "dirty". I just get unadorned, naked file icons.

Anyone have any ideas on how to fix it?

"Taste my sad, Michael" -G.O.B Bluth

Update:
So the "icon overlay" was looking more and more like an Eclipse issue, so I decided to start Eclipse with the "-clean" option.

/usr/lib/eclipse3.4.2/eclipse -clean


That fixed it. And still a few hours short of what it would have taken to reinstall Eclipse, plugins, and re-download all source code.

"Taste the happy, Michael" -G.O.B Bluth

Update:
It's still broken. Only the top-level folders were successfully restored after the -clean restart. After a few restarts and rebuilds, none of the files or folders have the icon overlay. So we're back to square one.

Following Ben's advice, I tried to install Subversive, but this did not help either. This seems to be a problem with Eclipse. It's as if Eclipse is blocking the icon overlay feature of any plugin (except the core plugins that mark files with "build errors". Checking the properties of any of the files definitely shows that they are "managed" and should have at least the "managed" icon.

One last thing (check the error logs again) and then I'm going to re-install Eclipse.

Last Update:
Ok, so some combination of the above instructions, as well as closing all projects and dealing with them one at a time, while drinking coffee, and threatening to reinstall Eclipse while shaking your fist at your computer, on top of the Celtics winning Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Semifinals has seemed to fix the problem.

I can't explain it folks. Just keep playing around until it works. The one project at a time helped me focus on what I was doing.

(1) Run the script to convert from svn 1.6 to svn 1.5
(2) Clean project
(3) Build project
(4) If that fails to work, close Eclipse and restart with the (-clean) option.

The last thing I was going to try was to create a brand new workspace and move one project over at a time (running the svn convert script). It didn't come to that thankfully.

As I mentioned earlier, the last resort option would have been to reinstall Eclipse and download all of my project source code. Given that half of my day was spent troubleshooting this, I would recommend going that route when you're confronted with this issue and can't get it resolved within an hour.

Walk MS 2009: Part 2

This is my mom (the one whose head is being covered by my giant hand). Her name is Claudia Angel Miranda. She's 56 years old. And she has Multiple Sclerosis.

Her middle/maiden name is no accident -- she had to be an angel to put up with the crap that we put her through when we were kids. But aside from possibly being an angel, she is also one of the greatest moms I've ever known. Heck, she's one of the greatest people I've ever known. Her strength, kindness, sensitivity made me the person I am today. I love the heck out of this woman.

My mom started having symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis in her mid-20's. She was diagnosed with MS around her 30th birthday. Multiple Sclerosis is one of the more confusing and misunderstood diseases out there. You need an M.D. just to understand the Wikipedia article about MS. But here are some facts:

There is no cure.

There are no known causes.

It physically and mentally debilitates people.

It affects each person in different ways.

It is painful to cope with MS.

It is painful to watch someone you love cope with MS.

---

This is a difficult subject for me - I’ve never been comfortable talking about my mother's condition. And it's never been easy for me to ask for help. However, I've realized over the years that my silence is not helping and that it’s extremely important for me to begin talking about MS in order to make more people aware of the disease.

Last year, with the help of friends, family and co-workers, I raised $3000 (ranking in the top 100 for the Wisconsin Chapter of the MS Society).

Thank you to everyone who donated last year.

This year, Megan and I are hoping to raise $5000. Yes, I realize that's quite a bit of dough, but $3000 seemed like a lot last year and we did it!

We don't need large donations. We just need lots of small donations. So donate $1, $5, $10, $25. It all adds up.

Donate $1, $5, $10, $25

OR

Join us for the MS Walk in Madison

Thank you so much for reading.