Hello subscribers!
I’ve included my posts that relate directly to my writing, but I do post other things at my blog. And at Mastodon.
Soon it will be sakura season and I’ll be posting about cherry blossoms.
New Backup Strategy
Authors should take backups seriously. And not just depend on free corporate solutions. I’ve read about people who trusted “the cloud” to keep their data safe only to have some faceless corporation invalidate their account and cause them lose everything overnight with no recourse.
Just like how, if you see “the economy” in a news article you should mentally replace it with “rich people’s yacht money”, when you see “the cloud” in a sentence, you should replace it with “someone else’s computer.” You shouldn’t trust someone else’s computer with your backups.
I’ve never been particularly strategic about backups. At least not since I was a doctoral student. While I was working on my dissertation, I became paranoid about losing my doctoral work. To reduce my anxiety, I got two Syquest EZ-135 drives and three cartridges that I rotated between my home and office, so I was well protected against data loss.
Since I’ve started working exclusively from home, I’ve been using syncthing to mirror my working files among all my devices and using a backup drive to make periodic backups. But I’ve become a bit concerned about not having an off-site backup.
For several years, I’d considered building a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device but I hadn’t found a straightforward recipe that didn’t look like a lot of work. I like maker projects, but I decided in the end that I wanted a solution more robust than something I hacked together from a recipe.
After discussion and some research, Philip and I decided to purchase identical Synology DS224+ devices and configure them to offer reciprocal off-site backups for each other. They have two spinning 12TB hard-drives in RAID1, so each can have one drive fail without data loss. That gives each of us about 5TB of backup, which I think will be ample for our needs for the foreseeable future.
So far, I’ve been quite pleased with the device. It only took a few minutes to figure out how to set up all of our computers to use rsync via public-key ssh connections and I’ve set up crontab entries to run daily backups. I can easily set it up to do backups more frequently if that seems warranted. Currently it’s just syncing, but I think I could get fancy and have it do periodic snapshots to protect against accidentally deleted files.
It does have high-level tools that are more accessible for less technical people. But I was pleased to be able to use the familiar tools low-level tools at the command line. Hopefully, once everything is set up, it will just sit there chattering quietly and give me peace of mind that a drive failure won’t be a catastrophe.
Recent and Coming Attractions
First, some great news! On March 28, 2025, I learned that I have received one of the inaugural Delphi Awards from the University of Massachusetts Amherst for non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty.
The UMass Amherst Delphi Leadership Award honors NTT faculty who have provided exceptional leadership and made innovative contributions in support of their non-tenure-track peers at UMass Amherst.
It comes with a modest monetary award, but I genuinely value the recognition more. Over my 30-year career, I spent a vast amount of time advocating for and working to improve working conditions for NTT faculty: I helped bargain the first promotional increment for NTT faculty, so-called “continuing appointment” which eliminated the need for fixed-term contracts after a probationary period, and the Professional Improvement Fellowship, which offers a sabbatical-like leave for NTT to work on a significant academic project. It’s nice when the quiet, patient work behind the scenes is recognized.
On April 5, 2025, I’m scheduled to sell books at the Amherst Global Village Festival on the Common in Amherst Massachusetts. I’ll bring my books of Esperanto haiku with English translation and my books of fiction, including Revin’s Heart and Better Angels: Tour de Force. I will also bring a selection of other books from Water Dragon Publishing.
The next day, on April 6, 2025, I’m hosting Michelle Trim via Zoom who will present Faking it and Breaking it: Generative AI and its Implications for Straw Writers Guild. Michelle co-chaired the UMass committee studying generative AI. I think she’ll have a lot of interesting insights to share.
On May 10, 2025, I will again be selling books, this time for Small Publishing in a Big Universe, at the Watch City Steampunk Festival. I had a great time last year doing this and I’m looking forward to going back again this year. There’s amazing cosplay and a lot of other really interesting vendors. If you’re anywhere near Waltham, it is definitely worth a visit.
In early June, I have signed up to attend the SFWA Nebula Conference. I have attended the Nebulas virtually before, but never in person. I’m looking forward to getting to know a lot of the people I’ve been working with as Secretary. And to give them a face to put with a name. I’ve proposed a few panels and maybe I’ll get to participate on one more panels during the conference. I’m also combining with the trip with some travel with my son and brother, so that will be nice too.
My next book, A Familiar Problem, is now scheduled to be released in June. Originally, it had been scheduled for January, but needed to be delayed by the publisher for several reasons. I’m looking forward to sharing it with everyone!
After that, there are a variety of other events coming up: Readercon, the Lambda Literary Writing Retreat, and Worldcon. But I’ll write about those next time.
