Hey, guys! I’m not going to be able to make it on Tuesday even though I’ll be in the area shortly thereafter.

I’d like to introduce you to Blanket, a library designed to make automated, remote backup easier. I’ve had to set up automated backup before, and I wrote this package to make it more enjoyable for myself and others. I was also experimenting with a lot of new technologies and techniques, which makes it even more rewarding that the end product ending being a preliminary success.

The pitch is: go from 0 to backed up in ten minutes plus transfer time. And you can set up as many blankets as you want, to backup a piece of filesystem, a MySQL database, an SVN repository (or Confluence, but I realize not everyone is into that.) After you get it working, it should take no time at all to put it in a cron job. Get your stuff backed up, people! It’s simple now, and I will help.

An introduction to Blanket is available at the excellent GitHub. There’s also the blanket project on RubyForge which means that I also have my first Gem in the wild.

Install it, kick it around, and if you like what you see, take a look at the development road map and see if you’d like to get involved. I have some GitHub invites if you need them, so please contact me if that’s an issue.