mdlbear | Entries tagged with backup

TL;DR: After February 26th, you will no longer be able to download books to your computer from that bookseller named after a river in Brazil. That means that you will not be able to back up your library to, say, a hard drive, or convert your books to a format you can read somewhere else.

Either of those would be a non-problem for people -- like me, until yesterday -- who only read books on their kindle, or the kindle app on their phone, and are comfortable with trusting $A to keep their books safely stored in the cloud. BUT, as pointed out in this article on Good E-Reader, they can no longer be trusted. They have been known to remove books from their store, and from the libraries of everyone who "bought" them, without notice, recourse, or recompense. They have also silently replaced books with modified (censored) versions.

You have until Tuesday the 25th to download your books.

After that you'll be able to sideload them onto a Kindle via USB, or use Calibre to remove the DRM and convert them to more portable ebook formats.

You can download books up to 25 at a time by putting them in collections. Not fun, if you have lots of books. Colleen and I had over 1000 between us. There is a bulk downloader: bellisk/BulkKindleUSBDownloader: Quick script to download all your Kindle ebooks. It's in Python and should be portable; the requirements can be installed with pip. It also needs Chromium. (Or Chrome, but you really don't want that.)

Good luck and happy hacking.

ETA: Claim Your Free COVID-19 Tests Now in Case the USPS Program Gets Shut Down - CNET

Well, not quite, but getting there. Readers with long attention spans or short friends lists may recall my remark that it was time to find a new backup drive, and that I'd "see if 500's go on sale at Fry's this week."

Well, they did, though in the end I went for a 400GB Seagate SATA drive at $89, rather than the 500GB IDE drive for $109 that got me into the store. The SATA will go in my nice new USB/eSATA case, and should give me higher bandwidth and a lower error rate.

It seems to be a sweet little thing -- noticably quieter than the Maxtor 160 it's replacing. Because this is a backup drive that I intend to keep for a while, it's getting the slow, read/write test on formatting. Probably take all night. (20070615T0607 it flipped over from the first pattern (aa) to the second(55) at about 5:30 this morning. After that there are ff and finally 00. So we're looking at finishing up somewhere tomorrow morning.)

Meanwhile, I've been thinking seriously about how I do backups. With a little cleverness I should be able to simplify things considerably, not to mention save space and speed things up. The biggest problem with my current backup scheme is that it involves keeping a lot of history around, but my audio workflow involves making lots of fairly volatile 32-bit wave files as intermediates. Oops.

So my current thinking is to not make a monthly archive and keep it forever, but to keep only a handful of backups and rely on version control for long-term history. Perhaps make long-term copies on a quarterly basis, and do it more selectively by having per-subtree exclude lists. I'll also be pruning out some defunct users, and shifting some working directories to make a cleaner distinction between private stuff in /home, and "semi-public" stuff elsewhere.

The main motivation for that, in turn, is the fact that I now have an offsite storage location with lots of bandwidth. Separating public and private tells me what I can safely upload in plaintext, and what I'll have to encrypt. (Some of the "semi-public" stuff -- for example, work in progress and lyrics to other peoples' songs -- won't be accessible to the general public, but it's still safe for it not to be encrypted.)

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