Backups are a very vital part of every computer system, be it a corporate PC network or simply your local workstation. Unfortunately, they are often neglected, although everyone knows how important they are. The “I haven't had any bad incidences yet, but I know I really should… guess what… I'll do it next week” attitude is only too well known by everybody, including myself.

Performing backups is a tedious process if done wrong. Thus backups need to done automatically in the background without any user intervention. As soon as someone feels the need to do something in order to get his stuff backed up, he will ultimately end up with no backup at all (and probably a bad conscience he only forgets too fast).

In this little two-part article series I will present two tools I've been playing around with a lot and I'll show you how you can use them to set up your own personal NAS with a spare piece of hardware such as a Raspberry Pi. No need for any expensive special storage system.

Read more…

With KDE 4.10 the file indexer has undergone some major changes which made it pretty usable so I decided to switch it on again. It turned out that the first stage indexing works exceptionally well. It indexed about 60,000 files in my home directory in the blink of an eye.

Unfortunately, I had to realize that the second level indexing does not work so well. I remember Virtuoso often eating up all my CPU in the past. Now Virtuoso keeps quiet, but nepomukindexer let's my workstation fly. It only starts indexing when my PC is idle, but for bigger files it keeps the CPU busy at a level of 100%, which is a pretty bad thing. There is already a Bug report about nepomukindexer consuming too much CPU time on larger files, but I didn't want to wait for a fix.

Long story short: I thought of ways to automatically limit the CPU usage of certain processes (not necessarily only Nepomuk).

Read more…