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I wrote this piece in February of 2008, and thought I would resurrect it in light of the recent controversy concerning its life expectancy.

A few months ago, I had a real scare with my hard drive. One of the bullet point selling points of Mac OS X 10.5 is Time Machine, the automatic backup software. As I thought about Time Capsule, my hard drive, and backups, I came to an awesome, terrible realization: all hard drives fail.

Looking over the specs, I can’t really find any way to replace the hard drive in this thing. This is critical, because it’s your last line of defense. If this thing goes down, you’re sunk.

Pondering the possibility of losing years of data on my disk, I realized how Apple could be setting itself up for failure. No, not because the device won’t sell — it will. And not because it isn’t marketed as another boutique product. It’s because the very device they’re selling can easily go against the convention they’re trying to enforce.

Years ago, Apple introduced this application called ‘Backup.’ It was part of the .Mac service, and it let you back things up in a simple, convenient way. That was the intention, anyways, as I’m not sure anybody really knows how to get the thing to work. And I’m pretty sure nobody’s dumb enough to trust it to back up anything more important than their Safari bookmarks.

That’s the problem with the backup solutions that are supposed to be what you would expect from Apple; not as feature–rich as you would hope, but comprehensive and very easy to use. They succeeded this time with Time Machine. And somehow, Backup yet lives — there must be a reason.

Getting to the reason for the continued existence of Backup led me to think about the rationale to make Time Capsule, the wire–less, hard–drive–based backup device. As Backup is to .Mac, Time Capsule is to local storage. They both follow the same mantra, but with vastly differing success.

Backup was always hampered by its connection to .Mac. There just wasn’t enough room to backup the files on your computer. You could, at most, back up a subset of the types of files like Word documents or all the files in your Documents folder. It surely wasn’t what you’d need for the ‘prosumer’ experience, and definitely wasn’t a professional–level solution.

Mac OS X 10.5 brought Time Machine, and the promise of backing up your entire file system, down to the minutia of your fonts and preference files. Sure, you needed a pretty big hard drive, but that sort of space is cheap right now, still more so that online. With a daily backup of everything — that comprehensive approach — you could get back what was lost, and that’s what we all want.

Selling hardware to meet that demand was the next logical step. Apple did this moving from iTunes to the iPod, and they’re doing the same thing from Time Machine to Time Capsule. The wireless capability is just a bullet point — what they’re really doing is selling convenience.

With that convenience, Apple is getting you to do something you should be doing: backing your data up. It makes everybody feel good, you see. Promote that healthy behavior. But it would make sense to use a piece of hardware you can fix, right?

As far as I can tell (since I haven’t been able to get my grimy paws on one, yet), there’s no way to change the hard drive in the Time Capsule. There’s a lot of precedent for this, from the iPod to the new MacBook Air. But that’s a bad idea when you’re using this as your solitary backup.

It’s the same problem you’d have if your primary disk went bad. One well–timed lightning bolt and every source of hope you’ve got is turned into stylish, over–priced paperweights. The message I’m trying to convey is this: instead of having one last chance (your hard drive) you’ve now got two (with Time Capsule). And until somebody does something about it, that’s all you’ve got.

I love fear–mongering. Even more so when it’s right in line with the idea Apple’s trying to get across to consumers. With Time Machine, they’re trying to say that cheap storage — online or local — is within the reach of pretty much everybody. If you can afford a computer with Leopard, you can afford to get a Time Capsule for your house.

Honestly, I agree. The thing that I’m wary of is that you’re purchasing a silver bullet — and that will lead people to the inevitable complacency. That lax attitude will lead to reliance on this system, and someday we’ll be watching videos about “Time Capsule’s Dirty Secret.” Nobody wants that to happen. Nobody.

So, solutions? I’m not sure. I’d really hate to think that this piece of hardware is going the same route as the iPods and Mac minis and Apple TVs and MacBook Airs before it. I’d hope that there was some way to replace the disk, or at least to get it recovered quickly. I would hate to think that people are trading a bag of magic beans for two bags of magic beans.

Just in case you ever wondered who you should block off and keep almost 100% of your site free from spammers and scrapers, I’ve found it’s always a good idea to block off the RIPE network. Not that it’s all a bad thing, or that you don’t get legitimate traffic from there, it’s just that a full 100% of the traffic I got from there was spammish.

Before we get started, some things to remember. Like last time, if you have no idea what I’m talking about, let the person who you bug about all things electronic do it for you. Also, this tutorial needs a modern Apache webserver. Most importantly, if you expect legitimate readers from the Asia Pacific region of the world, you could block your readers. Remember these things.

Copy and paste this into your .htaccess file:

#Amsterdam
deny from 62.
deny from 80.
deny from 81.
deny from 82.
deny from 83.
deny from 84.
deny from 85.
deny from 86.
deny from 87.
deny from 88.
deny from 89.
deny from 90.
deny from 91.
deny from 139.10.
deny from 139.12.
deny from 139.16.
deny from 139.18.
deny from 139.24.
deny from 139.28.
deny from 139.30.
deny from 147.83.
deny from 147.84.
deny from 147.91.
deny from 193.
deny from 194.
deny from 195.
deny from 212.
deny from 213.
deny from 217.
#Australia
deny from 58.
deny from 59.
deny from 60.
deny from 61.
deny from 165.228.
deny from 165.229.
deny from 168.140.
deny from 202.
deny from 203.
deny from 210.
deny from 211.
deny from 218.
deny from 219.
deny from 220.
deny from 221.
deny from 222.

That would be it.

The Amsterdam and Australia mean really nothing. They are just there to keep things organized. Doing a whois on the IP ranges shows to which branch of RIPE they belong. You can shuffle them all together into one neat list, if you like.

Like I wrote before, this is a throw-the-baby-out-with-the-bath-water approach to banning. The way I have it set up, you block everything in the IP range rather mercilessly. The only reasonable purpose for doing this would be if you are losing a lot of bandwidth to non–human traffic.

Ever had somebody (or, more likely, something) constantly hitting your website and wasting your precious internet resources? Then you have some options with Apache and .htaccess. This little tutorial will show you how to block an IP address.

Note: this will stop access to your site, not keep a site from finding your IP.

First, get a website. Got that? Good.

Now, make sure you have some sort of Apache server. If you’re not sure you have one, the rest of this won’t make much sense. If that’s the case, just go back and let your kid read the rest of this.

For those of you still with me, you’ll need to upload a file to your server called an .htacccess file. It’s simply an extension that tells the server what to do with all your files (Here’s some info from Apache). This is where the magic happens.

Inside that .htaccess file, you set up some variables to create certain events. If you use WordPress like I do, there is one uploaded when you install it. It’s in the top-level directory, just sitting there. Other content management systems use an .htaccess file as well, like Textpattern, Expression Engine, and Dupral.

If you open the file, you’ll see there’s some WordPress (or them other things’) specific code. Don’t fiddle with that. Just leave it be, because the part that the blogging software uses doesn’t really have much effect on what you are going to do.

I found this at JavaScript Kit, and it’s a wonderful way to keep the spammers, scammers, and scrapers off your site. Inside your .htaccess file, put this:

order allow,deny
deny from 123.45.6.7
deny from 012.34.5.
allow from all

This is how you deny by IP address. Find the offending IP address you want to stop, put it there, and that singular address will never be able to get to your site.