I’m spending time this weekend (Labor Day in the U.S.) getting all my machines cleaned up, patched up and backed up.

First on the list was to upgrade my WordPress blog due to a new worm that will hose your (precious) blog if it gets to you. You can read about it here. I have to admit that I have been putting this off as the upgrade docs, while not being anything too complicated, did require some cycles and I just have not wanted to be sidetracked lately.

Then I came across this monstrously useful plugin that automatically upgrades your WordPress installation! Just follow the bouncing ball and you are upgraded in minutes – nice! And Thanks!

Next it was on to applying patches to my server and laptops, running anti-virus scans, registry cleanup and other tuneup utilities and finally Ghost images of all.

My homebrew backup method has all my data and disk images and SVN repo on a RAIDed drive array on my server. I have 2 large disks that appear as one via a hardware RAID  board. I have a total of 4 disks: 2 in the server’s array, one in the trunk of my car (in case the house burns down) and one in my safe deposit box!

Hey, go ahead and laugh but my first storage medium was a cassette recorder (circa 1981) and if that teaches you one thing it’s that you can never be too safe! – Cheers!