On the importance of backups
I like to keep my stuff backed up. I've got a huge external drive next to my laptop that I use as a mac time machine. For stuff like tax backups, I also throw a copy in my dropbox. And another on my web server. I used to put a copy on a thumb drive. I wish I could find the source of a piece of advice I once read, but my google skill is lacking today. Basically, the jist was: "If you have n copies of something, you really only have n - 1 copies for all practical purposes." If you only have one copy of anything, you could find yourself without that thing any moment.

Making bunches of copies may also appeal to my inner hoarder sensibilities without taking up extra space in my house, but I'm going with the "just being safe" argument. At least publicly.

Either way, I realized just the other day that, to my horror, the only copy I have of my blog is the single database at my web host. I know for a fact that they do regular backups, but for my own piece of mind, I'd like to have copies myself.

So I wrote a little script that hooks into my django models, converts my posts to markdown formatting, and saves them to flat files. It also saves some meta data about each post in a related json file. At the moment it's nothing to write home about really, and it messes up the markup that I use for code blocks, but it's a good enough backup for most purposes. I plan on extending it a bit so that I can write posts as flat files and have them converted to html and synced back out to the live site, automatically push the copies to github, etc.

That's the other advantage. Now that my blog posts exist outside of a database, I can push the markdown files out to github. That way, if my grammar sucks or something, anyone can correct it and submit a pull request. That's assuming anyone cares to correct my grammar, but let's not get all academic here.

You can check out my backup script here, and the repository with copies of all my blog posts here.