This is a quick screencast to show you the data export solution I've created for Google App Engine that lets you backup your application's datastore and restore it either locally on your development machine or on the same Google App Engine application on the deployment environment or on a different Google App Engine application (which you can use as a staging environment).

(more...)

Sure, it can withstand a nuclear war, and we've got some records, but how much of our beloved Internet is a database error away from being lost?

Reading Robin Wauter's tweet and the heart-wrenching paragraph that is all that's left of one man's four years of blogging, it made me think again how little time most of us devote to backing things up.

(more...)

I've been a paid-up subscriber of the much-hyped Mozy remote backup system for about a year now. The only problem is that I haven't really used it in that time and I emailed them a few days ago to ask them to cancel my account (and I haven't heard back yet). The reason: I haven't successfully backed up once on my Mac.

(more...)