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Lifestream Data Structure

Now that our lifestream site is running I thought I'd apply the same structure to the files and data I generate daily.
These tend to be small documents , images , PDF files , Internet downloads , scripts , etc.

This way I have a new empty directory for the files I create and use each day.

Over the course of the year this folder gets larger but I can archive the oldest parts of the tree to DVD-R as required.

The tree structure gives each file 'revision' , so if I create a document on Monday and update it on Tuesday they are kept separate and I can roll back easily.

I use the Gnome "Search for Files" tool if the files exact location eludes me.

To get it working I created a script called lifestream_day_change which gets called at midnight via my crontab.

#!/bin/sh
# script to create a new days lifestream file system structure
#
# define location of lifestream
LOCATION=/home/mark/lifestream
# compute and store today variable
TODAY=$LOCATION/`date +%Y/%m/%d`
# first make a new directory and any required parents
mkdir -p $TODAY
#
# remove the previous lifestream folder link
rm ~/today
#
# create a link in the home directory to todays lifestream folder
ln -s $TODAY ~/today

In Nautilus I also have a sidebar entry for ~/today so its easy to locate in any file requester.

Backups

Today I decided to backed up my lifestream directory , first I measured its size with :-
du -hs /home/mark/lifestream/
As its only 101Mb I just used tar and gzip to create a simple archive file , like this :-
tar -czvf /home/mark/dvd_build/Backups/LifeStream_20080725.tgz /home/mark/lifestream/

Leave any ideas or improvements in the comments and I'll include them.

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