I just noticed when I got up this morning that somehow the text that I wrote in my colophon—or fancy designer about page—wasn’t there anymore. I’m not sure how this happened, but its back now. You can read it here.

I plan to add more to the colophon section when I have a little time. Mostly it is going to link to any of my notebook entries that talk about how I built this site and what stuff I used. One of the things I do on this site that I’ll just mention here because it just saved all that text I wrote the other night is backup. Because my site is hosted by joyent this is probably something they already do for me behind the scenes (I’m sure just about any hosting company would do this as well.) However, what’s so nice about joyent is that when you buy hosting, you also get all this backup space at Strongspace for free.

One of the things that you can do with Strongspace, because it is running a ZFS file system, is backup using snapshots. What this means is that every-night my web-server is backed up into a folder with that days date on it. So if I changed a file on Monday (like I did with this colophon) and it changes again on Tuesday I can just go into the folder with Mondays date and my file it there waiting for me. My understanding is that because of ZFS this can be done without taking up a lot of disk space at all. Fles that don’t change are still in each folder, but only take up any real space once. This, with the addition that ZFS compresses everything automatically means that something that should take up 27MB of space only takes up 9.7MB. Nice.

Now one of the things about this “backup by date” feature is its not exactly standard. What I mean by that is that its not something that Joyent will automatically do for you (yet.) If you are hosting with joyent and would like to set it up, your going to need to know how to use the terminal or a shell. If this is ok with you, here are the instructions that I used.

Lastly, this feature has saved my butt a couple times. I can’t wait to have leopard running with time machine so I can do this same thing with files on my mac.