I hope you will join me as a start a 5 part series of posts entitled 'Doing Development.' This series of articles will detail what I use for doing all of my development work both professional and personal. As anyone who has done serious web development knows, there is more to creating an application than just opening a code editor and hacking away.

The Lineup

1. Setting up VMware Server

2. Installing OpenBSD

3. Setting up Apache

4. Setting up Eclipse

5. Setting up Subversion

I will publish one article a week in addition to any other regular posts that I have. Any comments are welcome as I'd love to hear how other people do their development.

One thing that a lot of developers don't even think about is backing up their source control repository. If, like me, your code is stored in Subversion then backing up and subsequently restoring the data is easy.

Backing Up

svnadmin has an option to do a dump which is a full command history of your repository. Because of this the file can end up quite large if you have a repository with a lot of changes. A quick way to back up and compress the repository is:

$ svnadmin dump /path/to/repo | gzip -9 -c > archivename.gz

This dumps the repository straight into gzip to compress it down to then write it to a file. With a little bit of shell scripting this can be turned into a very nice backup script.

Restoring

What happens when you need to restore your repository? You load the information back in! You can take the backup we made above and reload it into the repository with:

$ gzcat archive.gz | svnadmin load /path/to/repo

This will dump your backup into a fresh repository so that it looks exactly like it did when you took the backup.

Who?

My name is Chris Tankersley, a web application developer and programmer in Ohio. I specialize in PHP development and dabble a bit in C# and Python. Most of my day is spent heading up the web department for a small insurance company but otherwise I spend my time with my family and manage to get some personal programming done as well.

Wha?

This is a blog that will run along with my new site, http://www.tankersleywebsolutions.com . I am a firm believer in being open with my development and programming, so this is a great way to keep that transparency.

Huh?

Damn, I was really hoping all the above made sense...