zzyzx 2016.4.0

Do you believe in the cloud? It’s in fact only somebody else’s computer. Those might fail or get hacked.

Do you believe in bug-free software? Nah, it’s more likely every now and then a crash, a bug, a race condition or some other back luck will lead to data corruption of the things that you work on.

Do you think you’ll be able to access your notes in thirty years? It’s likely the data format they’re stored in is going to be hard to read.

This is why I store all my notes in my e-mail. It’s been there since the 1970s, it’s going to be there in the 2050s. MIME and IMAP ensure the data is more-less plaintext and easily human-readable even without any tool support. Apple Notes support it on both OS X and iOS. Pure win.

But wait, what about software failure? What if a bug erases my notes or there’s a data center fire and the data restored from a backup is in a state from two days ago? What about bitrot?

Enter zzyzx.

This is the most primitive backup system ever. Set it up in cron on your laptop or a server you control and it will create incremental backups with history between runs (setting up a Mercurial repository). It also creates useful symlinks to human-readable note titles so you can find them more easily.

$ pip install zzyzx
$ cat >~/.zzyzx
[server]
host=mail.example.com
user=john@example.com
pass=secret

[backup]
repo_path=~/Notes
ignore_prefix=INBOX.Notes
$ zzyzx