Month: March 2023

The importance of a good backup strategy

I received a support email from a Simon customer who had a hard drive failure, and lost their data. Worse still, they were in the process of recreating their Time Machine backup at the time, so didn’t have a backup.

That prompted me to post about my backup strategy. When you live your life and make your living on computers, there is little more valuable than the data they contain. So it is critical to protect it from a loss that could set you back years.

Fortunately nowadays most important data is in the cloud… various remote servers. For example, if you use Apple Music, your music collection is safely on Apple’s servers (well, hopefully safely). Similarly for Apple Photos, and other iCloud services. And other services like Dropbox help protect important documents… if you put them in there.

For myself, I have a multi-pronged data management and backup strategy.

In terms of data management, I use cloud services to sync my data between my devices, which has the added benefit of keeping offsite copies of the important data:

  • My documents are all stored in Dropbox.
  • My app source code is managed by GitHub.
  • My music, photos and other data are stored in iCloud.

In fact, I replaced the Documents folder in my home directory with a symbolic link to a Documents folder within the Dropbox folder, so all of my documents are safely in Dropbox. It’s not necessary, but you can easily do this via a couple of simple Terminal commands: 

sudo mv ~/Documents ~/Dropbox/Documents

sudo ln -s ~/Dropbox/Documents ~/Documents

The first command moves the Documents folder to within Dropbox, and the second one makes a symbolic link to that folder where the old Documents folder was. The sudo is needed as the OS will normally prevent moving the Documents folder; Terminal will prompt you for your password.

But that doesn’t mean that backups aren’t important too. Backups are useful to get back earlier versions of documents (via Time Machine), or provide redundancy in case a cloud service loses something, or just as a quick way to get back up-and-running. Plus, of course, protecting data like settings that aren’t included in Dropbox or other cloud syncing.

I use multiple services for backups, too:

  • I use Time Machine to do hourly incremental backups of the most important files. Useful to get back earlier versions of documents.
  • I use Carbon Copy Cloner to make nightly exact clones of my SSD main drive and spinning media drive onto backup disks. Useful to quickly get back up-to-speed if a hard drive fails, or I need to revert an obscure file.
  • I use Backblaze to make nightly offsite backups of pretty much all of my files. Useful in case of a major disaster like my house burning down, or failure of one of the other backups.

(Full disclosure, if you use the Dropbox link to sign up I’ll get more space, not that I need it, and you’ll get 500 MB bonus space. And similarly that Backblaze link will give both you and I a free month of service.)

Your data is valuable — don’t risk losing it when it is so easy to protect it!

Simon tip: groups

One feature request that I received many times for Simon was the ability to organize tests into folders or groups — especially useful for people with lots of tests, or simply want to collect all tests relating to a particular server or client together.

Tests can be grouped together however you wish. It’s easy to create a group: simply choose the New Group command in the File menu or the + pop-up menu, then drag the tests into the new group. Even easier, you can just select some tests and choose the New Group with Selection command to make a group and move those tests into it in one step.

New menu

Groups appear with disclosure triangles, enabling them to be collapsed. The group row shows a summary of the contents, with any common values displayed for easy reference. And similarly, the info pane shows a summary of the contained tests.

Tests

Groups can even be nested, if desired — you can have an unlimited number of groups within other groups, if that helps organize them.

But wait, there’s more! While grouping tests is perhaps one of the most-requested features, I didn’t stop there: you can also group services, filters, notifiers and reports in the same way!

Notifiers

When these items are grouped, they appear indented in the Kind pop-up menu in the test editor, so you can keep related items together:

Popup

I hope you enjoy this feature.

Simon tip: hide the Dock icon

Simon has a feature that many people have asked for over the years: the ability to hide the app from the Dock.

By default, the Dock icon is shown, but there is an option in the General Settings to hide it.

Why might you want to hide it? Maybe you want to keep your Dock as sparse as possible. Simon’s Dock icon can display the most interesting status, but maybe you don’t need to see that all the time, or you’re satisfied with seeing that only in the status menu. Since you’d probably want to keep Simon running all the time, treating it as a background-only app can make a lot of sense. Now you can!

General Settings

If you turn off the Show the Simon icon in the Dock checkbox, the app icon vanishes from the Dock, and also from the Cmd-Tab app switcher. Note that if you have chosen the Keep in Dock option in the Dock menu, the icon will linger, in an inactive state; you can disable that or drag the icon out of the Dock to remove it.

When Simon is hidden from the Dock, you can still activate the app via the status menu, if you have that enabled — and the app will automatically turn it on when you turn off the Dock icon, as a convenience. If you don’t want the status menu, you can turn it off again… in which case the only way to activate the app will be to click on one of its windows, if any are visible, or open it from the Finder.

One thing to note is that as a necessary side-effect of hiding the Dock icon, Simon will no longer have a menubar. It’ll truly be a background-only app. When you display the Simon Monitor window, the menus won’t change from whatever other app you were using. This isn’t a problem for most functions, as the toolbar buttons and sort drop-down menu options cover most menu commands. But for app functions like checking for updates, accessing preferences, etc, when the Dock icon is disabled a special action menu is added to the toolbar. For power users, the keyboard equivalents still work, too — so you can press Ctrl-Cmd-1 to switch to Preview mode, for example.

Actions

I know that this is an exciting feature for many customers. For anyone who wants Simon to “disappear” into the background, try turning off the Dock icon. You can always turn it back on again. No restart required.

Simon password protection

Simon includes a password feature, that can be used to require a password when Simon is launched or activated. This provides some level of security to prevent unauthorized people from accessing the app. It doesn’t encrypt data or any other changes, it’s just a simple access control.

By default, a password is not required. If you want to require one, open up the General Settings. Notice the Choose Password… button and the text to the left indicating that a password hasn’t been set:

Password not required

Click the button to display the password sheet. If a password hasn’t already been set, the first field will be disabled (and display “None”). If one has been set, enter the existing password there. The next two fields are for the new password; enter the same one in both, or leave them both blank to disable the password feature. If entering a password, you should also enter a hint that will remind you of the password (without being too obvious):

Password sheet

After setting a password, the text in the Settings window will change to indicate so:

Password required

When a password has been set, whenever you activate Simon it will display an unlock sheet, asking for the password. It includes a Quit button to quickly stop Simon, and a Cancel to deactivate Simon. After two failed attempts, it will display the password hint (if any); after two more failed attempts, it’ll disallow further attempts until after you quit or cancel:

Unlock

I expect that most people won’t need this feature, but for those who do, it should prove quite useful.