Tag Archive for 'backup'

Downloading All GTalk Chats

Published on 1 year, 2 months ago in Tech. 0 Comments

There might be various reasons why one would want to download all of their gtalk/gmail chats. Google does not provide any api to do so. So quite naturally, I googled my problem and found a workaround.

Log into your gmail account from Google Chrome. Create a filter that labels all the chats.

Click on the Create Filter link which can be found beside the Search Mail box. For the search criteria, use Chat With text in the Subject text area. For the action set, you may just choose to have all these filtered mails to be labeled as LOGS. Make sure to have the filter applied to all the previous mails as well.

Now that we have filtered out all the chats, we need to have them downloaded. Go to Settings->Offline and toggle on the option. Since we are only interested in chats, choose only the LOGS label for downloading. Wait for all the chats to get downloaded. It may take a while.

Google chrome has a local folder where all the gears files are stored. The location at which our file can be found is:

%AppData%\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Plugin Data\Google Gears\mail.google.com\https_443

We are only interested in the main database file. You can identify it by the following name:

.com-GoogleMail#database

Copy this file to a convenient location, say the Desktop. Rename the file to candorz.

Next a couple of scripts need to be downloaded. They can be found at extract.7z and sql4.7z. Extract these two files to the same location as above. Double click on the sql4 script and watch as a new folder called msgs is created and populated with all the chats. The extracted chats are in xml format.

Popularity: 4% [?]

Svn Repository Backup

Published on 1 year, 11 months ago in Tech. 0 Comments

Ever since I started using svn I have found it an indispensable tool. I have created a local repository on my hard disk and all my personal projects are using this repository. And having had lots of hard disk crashes last year, I fear for the loss of my code files. So, I thought about a regular backup system.

I also have Ubuntu installed as a virtual machine. And Ubuntu has this Ubuntu One feature, which gives you a 2gb space online. So I went ahead to backup my repository to this space.

I have my repository mounted in Ubuntu at /mnt/WinRepository. The following script takes a dump of the repository:

svnadmin dump /mnt/WinRepository --incremental > ~/Ubuntu\ One/WinRepo.bak

The advantage of using incremental option is that I can specify revision range to be backed up into different files.

svnadmin dump /mnt/WinRepository --revision 0:100 > ~/Ubuntu\ One/WinRepo1.bak
svnadmin dump /mnt/WinRepository --revision 101:200 --incremental > ~/Ubuntu\ One/WinRepo2.bak
svnadmin dump /mnt/WinRepository --revision 201:HEAD --incremental > ~/Ubuntu\ One/WinRepo3.bak

And since the files are being saved in Ubuntu One folder, they get automatically backed up to the Ubuntu One online space.

This does not compress the files. But since I have 2 gb of space available, I am not really concerned about space.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Backup : Ubuntu Intrepid

Published on 2 years, 10 months ago in Tech. 0 Comments

Well, when it comes to twidling around with Linux installation, I am a newbie. Usually my experiments end up with me not knowing how to reverse the side effects. I have no choice other than to live with the problems created. But periodically I have to do a complete reinstall of my system to keep it running well (also because after a certain point I cannot bear to see all the broken application, dead links and innumerable errors). Earlier it was a pain to do complete reinstall, because I would lose all my configuration files unless I explicitely saved them. Thus began my search to discover a backup tool for ubuntu.

I stumbled across this thread which says that all you need to do is to make a tar of all your files, thus saving the present state of ubuntu. If a restore is required, just expand the archive. This can be done on a running system too. Just restart after the exoansion is done, and the ubuntu gets restored to its state when the zarchive was created.

However, archiving all the files requires a lot of space. Also it takes time to everytime archive all the files. An alternative option I came across was to sync the files. I have used this method to create a backup of all my files. Sync is much faster than creating tar archive because sync only copies the files that have been modified since the last sync operation.

I have opted to backup only my /home/anu folder. This is what needs to be done.

rsync -av /home/anu /media/Downloads/syncUbuntu

rsync is the command used to sync the files. /home/anu is my user directory. I have an externally mounted USB drive. It shows up in /media with the label Downloads. I have created a new folder syncUbuntu within this drive to contain my sync files. Now all I have to do is run the above command and my files get sync with the files already present in the syncUbuntu folder.

The first time that you run the command takes time as all the files have to be copied. However the next time onwards the process requires hardly a few seconds. It is a great way to backup the system. And now I know I have all my files backed up to be called upon whenever needed.

To make the process easier, I created an alias in the bashrc file. I named it backup. This is the line that I added

alias backup=’rsync -av /home/anu /media/Downloads/syncUbuntu’

To backup my files, I now need to type backup in my terminal and I’m done.

Popularity: 1% [?]