Thanks to Rafe I have a shell account on symbiandiaries.com from where I host this blog.
I hacked up a quick script that tar-gzips my blog, the plugins dir, and some other files and mails the resulting file in an attachement to my Gmail account. After about a month, I delete backups that are too old.
This presented no problems, as the file was usually under 700 kB. Being a belt-and-braces kind of guy, I keep a copy of the file on the symbiandiaries.com account.
Today I received a warning mail from the system warning me that the account was nearing it’s quota limit. I quickly discovered a number of 35 MB files in the backup directory. I had backed up the movies from the cruise two weeks ago.
I fixed this via the --exclude directive to GNU tar, deleted the
offending files in my account, then logged into Google to check how
they were affecting my 1 GB quota there.
They weren’t affecting it at all. They weren’t there.
Obviously, Gmail blocks mails with attachments larger than a certain amount. I can’t argue with that, it’s their system, and sending big attachments via SMTP is evil. But it lulled me into a false sense of security, because for nearly a week, I had no backup of this blog.
The lesson here is don’t try to use a system for something it’s not designed to handle. I’ll continue mailing my backups to gmail, but I’ll be watching them carefully for size from now on.