ISOs, DD and HDIUTIL - Backup Preparation
I moved recently, and as part of that mess, discovered a number of old hard disks, CDs and DVDs that had just been sitting in boxes and closets. Now, I know that most of this data is trash since I haven't used it in some time and really haven't missed it. I try telling myself that I should just destroy it and move on. But still in the back of my mind, I know that there are files and work on those disks that I would like to salvage. So, inspired by the recent launch of the AWS Glacier service, I've decided to undertake a significant archaeological task. I picked up two disk enclosures and outfitted my 09 Mac Mini with two additional DVD drives. The plan is to bust out my Computer Forensics skills, and pull all of the data off the disks raw. At the same time, go parallel and rip as much removable media to ISO's as I can three at a time. With the data pulled, compressed and encrypted, I'll push each blob up to Glacier. Once I get really motivated, I'll start pulling each blob down and picking them apart using something like ProDiscover. Using ProDiscover I'll be able to pull both live files and those I had mistakenly deleted.
For those interested in doing something similar, here are a few basic commands to make your ISO ripping a cinch.
Rip a CD to a Joliet formatted ISO using HDIUTIL
hdiutil makehybrid -iso -joliet -o image.iso /path/to/source
Raw byte by byte copy using DD
dd if=/dev/cdrom of=/destination/path/cdrom.iso
A note on dd - be sure that the drive you're ripping has been unmounted prior to using dd.
Tired of WordPress
Last night I took a good look at my blog that I had not touched in quite some time. It consisted of a few solid posts, a few not-so-solid posts, and a huge collection of half finished posts. It was a WordPress blog. Like most WordPress blogs, I had a few themes and plugins installed. It was nothing really noteworthy.
This blog was really just a security hole.
I've patched this system more often that I have written entries. To run WordPress, I run a server (Linux), a web server (Apache), and a database (MySQL). That is a bunch of upkeep, and I just don't have time for it anymore. So, I thought, why bother with all of this overhead? I've had one comment on this blog, and more importantly, I loath comments in general. I do not need a blog capable of providing highly dynamic content.
Inspired, I started doing something I hadn't done in almost two years. I started hacking up some raw HTML and CSS. "Just a basic page." I thought. "I just want to focus on the content." So, in about an hour of tweaking font sizes, and setting up a few S3 buckets to house my content, my new site had form.
I've been meaning to actually use a few new technologies recently, so I figured this was a good opportunity to pick up Node.
The next afternoon after work, I hacked together a JSON data file to house my entries and a quick Node.js script using Mustache.js to render static pages and upload those to S3.
Now, rather than running all of those systems, my blog consists of generated static files on S3.
Advantages:
- there is no software to patch
- the system will always perform well
- it is super cheap
- highly cacheable content