rejon.org is Jon Phillips.

In my continuing series of lazyweb posts, I’m seeking the best and easiest backup option for my house. What I want to do and what I should do is probably two different things.

So, I’ve got my home setup on a big APS power backup, purchased a couple of 200 GB ide hard drives, and need one final component, a cheap computer with lots of storage bays. My goal is to slap these hard drives (and more in the future) into a new-old box, and start running Dirvish to backup my main desktop (workbox), my main laptop (lifebook), and my gf’s G5 (deerbox).

Is this is sane approach? Also, where is the best place to get a cheap computer. I really don’t want to have to buy one at all, and thought I would just come across some cheap/free computer over the last couple of months, but am afraid of going into Frys and other tech stores (to be honest).

(BTW: I backup my computers by syncing the home folders between them, so that they have the same good stuff. Also, I have a portable drive I’ve been backup up my home folders up to, but have been bad in not doing a full system backup…)

The other approach I’m considering is to just to do encrypted backups to my webhost, Dreamhost. I have 200Gb of storage on there, sooooo, why not just store it there past the inital burst of the first rsync

I want to be able to set my presence (or ideally have my computer figure this out with idle time, image analysis with camera, amplitude detection with mic/sound, etc) and have all apps across my free desktop on gnome or xfce react accordingly so I don’t have to set this in each application.

I also would like for my computer to know when the networking is unavailable and react accordingly. Yes, I know that the right way to do this is dbus, galago and support of applications for the right messages.

My question is, is there an applet to set this presence and/or is there a quick way to get this going generically and bonus points if good way(s) in gentoo?