Monthly Archive for January, 2008

Interruptible link-dest Backup Solution

I was inspired by Time Machine for every Unix out there to use the link-dest technique for backing up one external disk to another, however I found some limitations in its implementation, so I modified the script.

  1. Moved Source and Destination into variables.
  2. Added a Progress directory so the script can be interrupted and resumed.
  3. Added an exclude file to the Source directory so that the External disk’s special folders (Spotlight, etc) are not copied.
  4. Added the -E flag to rsync so it copies Extended Attributes on Mac OS X (remove if you are not using Mac OS X).
  5. Added the -x flag to rsync so it does not span disks.
  6. Added the –delete flag to rsync so if rsync fails upon re-running the script files deleted from the source are deleted from the Progress directory.
  7. Modified the Date format to mimic Time Machine’s.
  8. Modified the Destination so that it directly uses it rather than a subdirectory.
  9. Modified the symbolic link command so it removes the old Latest link and creates the new one in one step.
  10. Use && to ensure commands don’t occur if rsync fails.

The script (Updated to fix bug):

#!/bin/sh

source="/Volumes/Gray"
destination="/Volumes/Gray Backup"

mkdir -p "$destination/Progress"
rsync -aPEx --delete --exclude-from="$source/.exclude" \
            --link-dest="$destination/Latest" \
            "$source" "$destination/Progress" \
    && date=`date "+%Y-%m-%d-%H%M%S"` \
    && mv "$destination/Progress" "$destination/$date" \
    && ln -sfh "$date" "$destination/Latest"

Adobe Digital Editions

I’ve got an eBook for school. It’s a DRM’d PDF file that I’ve been reading in Adobe Reader 7.0.7. After upgrading to Adobe Reader 8, every time I open the DRM’d PDF it takes me to 1.

However, I can’t find the download link! Under Download and Install, all I see is a flash object that when clicked takes me to 2, and from there clicking 3 takes me to a 404 page.

Furthermore, there is no contact form to submit this issue to Adobe.

Now what do I do?