Backups of data in the ether

While I’ve often told mystified people that hosted services - the free ones - aren’t required to backup your data, and you should probably do it yourself, I usually didn’t worry about this very much - all of my web apps are on my own boxes, as well as my email. However, out of curiosity, I spent about 15 minutes the other day coding up a little hack of a PHP script to keep track of what applications I use a lot (specifically web-based ones that I can’t easily have my OS keep track of). After a day of trying to click the little “update” boxes on a simple page when I used something, I realized how much of my data is actually out of my own control. Maybe not anything critical, but convenience stuff like Google Reader, del.icio.us for *all* of my bookmarks, and occasionally Google Docs when I’m going to be hopping from place to place, or may be using a machine that I don’t trust to SFTP something back home.

So, I decided to go about backing up some of this. The solution I aimed for was simple - a BASH script that runs nightly via cron, and dumps the data into my home directory on my main storage/backup server.

Google Reader seemed to be one of the most difficult - no easy URL scheme, but I found a simple script that makes use of Perl CPAN’s WebService::Google::Readermodule to grab a complete feed list. After seemingly an hour of CPAN updates and dependencies scrolling down my screen,

Google Calendar Backup:
Wonderfully simple. Go into Settings, copy the URLs to the private calendar links (I used iCal format), and wget them.

del.icio.us backup:

curl --user usernam:pass -o myDelicious.xml -O 'https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all'

Google Reader Backup:
Still in the works - Perl problems on my backup machine.

Google Docs Backup:
Hopefully soon, though nothing important lives there.