Search the whole SVN repository for a given filename

The SVN repository at work is huge, and I don't have the disk space to checkout the whole thing with the branches and everything on my small (but very fast) laptop SSD. But I needed to search through the whole repo for a file, the following command line can help out.

Windows

svn list -R https://subversion-repo/subfolder | findstr filename

Nix

svn list -R file:///subversion-repo/subfolder | grep filename

These commands don't look through the history but will find things at the current HEAD of the repository.

If you want to look for a particular point in time you can specify the revision thus:

svn list -r 1234 -R https://subversion-repo/subfolder | findstr filename

where 1234 is the revision to search though.

If you want to search the entire history you could script the search to look though every revision from 1 to n and list the files that match the search at each revision, then remove duplicates to get a single list. How about getting even fancier by recording the revision the file was first found and the revision it was deleted at. I have no requirement to do this right now but sounds like an interesting little project to try.

If you want to search for text in files I find searching the diffs useful. Just pipe the following into a file and search that in your favorite editor (Sublime text :-)

svn log -r1234:HEAD --diff https://subversion-repo/subfolder

this can be rather verbose but with a bit of tweaking and targeting of the repo/folder you can get some accurate results on text search in history

Personal Backup strategies

Its been on my mind of late that I don't have a very good backup strategy in place for my own things at home. I've got many gigs of photos, code, documents, videos that are locally backed up but all over the place and not very consistent, and then there is gmail and the 4 gig of emails in there. So I'm doing something about it.

The solution is:

Dropbox

I use dropbox for cloud sync and storage. This is not back up. I use it to get access to files easily from anywhere, but if I accidentally delete or change something, then the change is propagated straight to dropbox, so (unless you have packrat) its quite hard to undo the change or get to an older version.

I keep a local copy of all the dropbox files on my home server.

gmail

A weekly download of all gmail to local machines using gmvault. The official guide to set up
is here, but Scott Hansleman did a great write up of how to do this here.

This boils down to two commands. The first for the initial sync, the second for incremental backups on top of the same folder structure.
gmvault sync youremail@gmail.com -d D:\foldertosaveto
gmvault sync -t quick youremail@gmail.com -d D:\foldertosaveto
Output of my initial run. Yes took a while to run...
================================================================
Sync operation performed in 2h 36m 35s.
Number of reconnections: 70.
Number of emails quarantined: 0.
Number of emails that could not be fetched: 0.
Number of emails that were returned empty by gmail: 0
================================================================

Scheduled job

I have set up a scheduled job (in windows task scheduler) which runs a script every Friday that backs up the week's email to my hard disk. This script is just a simple .bat file where the contents are thus:
gmvault sync -t quick youremail@gmail.com -d D:\foldertosaveto
You will need to make sure that gmvault is on your path if you do it this way. setting up scheduled jobs is easy too. There are loads of on-line tutorials, here is one for windows 8.

Amazon glacier

1. Sign up for Amazon glacier, you will need your credit card for this (first you need to sign up for an Amazon AWS account)
2. Once logged in, create a key pair (Access Keys (Access Key ID and Secret Access Key)) save them to your machine.
3. Go to the glacier console and create a vault for each type of backup you are planning on doing. I've created two for now, one for my photos and one for my mail backups. I might create another for music later.
4. Ensure you have chosen the data centre closest to you for the vaults. Both of mine are in EU Ireland.

Cloudberry online backup

I use cloudberry online backup to do the heavy lifting of actually sending all my files up to amazon
http://www.cloudberrylab.com/amazon-glacier-storage-backup.aspx#amazonglacier. Its great you just set up some backup plans and a schedule and cloudberry does the rest. Its not free but really quite cheap given what it does and how well it does it.

1. Install the cloudberry online backup desktop version (download from: http://www.cloudberrylab.com/amazon-s3-cloud-desktop-backup.aspx )
2. Add a glacier cloud storage account (File->amazon glacier)
3. Follow the wizard - it's really easy
4. Go to the backup plans tab and create a new plan or use a predefined plan
5. For my gmail backup I created a new plan
6. Click the backup wizard (backup files). Again, a real easy wizard to follow. Select the glacier account/vault, the files to back up and the schedule. So easy.

Costs

I'm storing 150 gig in amazon glacier, that costs me £1.50 per month and I can store as much as I like, practically unlimited storage. Be careful though because it costs a lot more to get it out. But that's ok right? This is emergency backup. You might be able to get your files back from dropbox, local backup etc. Glacier is the long term emergency backup we all need.

Summary

The whole point was to get all the files that I care about into cheap storage with multiple redundant backup locations, so if/when I lose some data I can get it back. Dropbox provides an easy way to get back files but its not a total solution, amazon provides the cheap offsite secure backup that I want for my 150 gig+ of data.

Other options:

• You could do a lot of what is outlined above manually using http://www.cloudberrylab.com/free-amazon-s3-explorer-cloudfront-IAM.aspx which is a free product from cloudberry.
• Or something like http://www.2brightsparks.com/freeware/freeware-hub.html which can do local backups for you but won't do the cloud backup for you.
• Dropbox packrat can store revisions and persist deleted files, its a paid add-on to dropbox.
• You can now also download your gmail in a zip format, I've not looked into this but there might be potential here, although I've no idea how automateable this is, if at all: http://gmailblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/download-copy-of-your-gmail-and-google.html

---

Comments from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6927659

* by drdaeman

Isn't Glacier overpriced, compared to other personal backup solutions?

Say, I have a mere 2TiB of historical data (various junk I made or collected over last ten years or so). Storing on them with Amazon is $20/mo, and if I want to look on that photos from 2008 I have to wait for several hours just to find that I misremembered where they were stored and pulled out wrong files. And unless it happened that I uploaded a good amount of data on that exact day, I'll have to pay for downloads.

Other offers for unlimited storage are Cyphertite at $10/mo, Crashplan at $6/mo, Carbonite at $100/yr, AltDrive at $4.5/mo and so on. While they're probably not-so-unlimited (they don't say that, but I guess one won't have much luck storing a petabyte), less respectable than Amazon, and most services lack an API and require to use not-so-trusty proprietary software that has to be sandboxed properly, Glacier doesn't look like a good deal to me unless we're talking about backing up some either quite big data (like tens of terabytes) or relatively small amounts of data (less than 500GiB).

Disclaimer: I have no affiliation to any of companies mentioned above. Just happens that I'm currently fleeing from Bitcasa (they suck hard) and looking at various options to not maintain a self-hosted NAS.

* by tfe

The difference is that I trust Amazon far more than those other companies you mentioned. If they go out if business or even change their "unlimited" policy, you're exposed until you can get your 2TB re-uploaded to another provider. It's a pain and a risk I'm unwilling to take. I know Amazon isn't going to suddenly try to dump me as a customer.

* by damianstanger

Yes all good points. I have a relatively small data set < 200GiB and so my costs with glacier are less than $2 per month :-)

* by hengheng

I am using Glacier to store a backup of most of my personal data. This includes my home directory, the most relevant photos I have taken as jpeg, my gmvault and that's about it. I do not copy over any movies, music, raw photos or software, as this is my last line of defense, so it only needs to cover the essentials. I am under 1€ per month this way, and the backup gets refreshed only every other month or so.

I do have a local server that stores a windows backup image of my whole laptop, a second Harddisk in that Server to store a copy of the server, and an external hard disk with a windows backup at my parents that gets a refresh every time I am over there. All backups are truecrypt images for good measure, and I have tested recovery. Amazon stores a split truecrypt archive. Recovery cost about 20€ and took a day.

So yes, glacier is great as a personal backup, if you make it part of a larger strategy. To me, this is disaster recovery, and a small price to pay for this kind of insurance of important files and memories.

Script your build and deployment of android cordova apps with powershell

We are developing a new version of our customer facing solution, across web, ios and android, using cordova(phonegap).

Im a big proponent of build automation, and the classical (recommended?) way of using eclipse to build and manage the code base was getting me down, so i decided to write some scripts to build and deploy the app to either a device, an emulator or prepare for release. I also wanted any developer to be able to checkout the code and run the scripts to build the app.

I wrote the scripts in powershell (sorry!) with some batch files to make the various functions easy to run (im developing on windows 8 by the way).

You can find the scripts here: https://github.com/DamianStanger/AndroidBuildScripts

So how does it all work?

firstly it goes with out saying that you need your dev env set up for android development on the command line with cordova http://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/edge/guide_cli_index.md.html#The%20Command-Line%20Interface

As you will know (if you do cordova development) when you use the command line tools for creating cordova apps the folder created is where all your source code is placed and inside there is the www folder that is where you keep your .js and .html files. The problem is that you are keeping your source code along side the automatically built cordova files, not ideal. so I've created my own source folder that is where all the code you edit is kept. We then use powershell to copy these files to the correct places.

The development process

In a powershell (or dos cmd if you prefer)

build.bat
emulate.bat or install.bat

Line 01. run either or, depending on if you are using a real device or not

That's it. Now you might notice that build can take a wile to run because its setting up everything from scratch so i created a shortcut that will only copy your changes across.

quickCopy.bat
emulate.bat or install.bat

This is all good for general day to day dev but eventually you will want to test a production build on a real device for this use the following commands

release.bat
installRelease.bat

To make this work you must only have either a device plugged into usb or an emulator turned on (please use genymotion its so much faster than a standard emulator)
The release process signs and aligns your apk for you :-) so when you are ready you just send the apk you have tested to the play store.

The scripts

Here I'm going to show select lines of code from build.ps1

For building the app in debug and getting that on to your emulator or phone

function create()

cordova create app-cordova-android com.myapp.app myapp
...
cordova platform add android
...
cordova plugin add org.apache.cordova.device

function build()

cordova build android

function emulate()

cordova emulate android -d

function installDebug()

cordova run android -d

To build the releaseable apk and to get that onto your phone use the following:

function release()

cordova build android --release

function sign()

jarsigner -verbose -sigalg SHA1withRSA -digestalg SHA1 -keystore ..\appstore\android-keystore\myapp -keypass myappKeyPassword -storepass myappStorePassword -signedjar .\platforms\android\bin\myapp-release-signed.apk .\platforms\android\bin\myapp-release-unsigned.apk myapp
zipalign -f -v 4 .\platforms\android\bin\myapp-release-signed.apk .\platforms\android\bin\myapp-release-signed-aligned.apk

function installRelease()

adb uninstall com.myapp.app
adb install .\appstore\APKs\myapp-release-signed-aligned.apk

Release versioning

When doing a release to the play store you need to make sure the version numbers are incremented each time, for this i added a helper which will update all the relevent places in the source for you.

just run:

setVersion 102 1.0.2

This will change all the files that need changing in order to properly put a new version of the app onto the play store.

Upload to play store error

Upload failed
You uploaded a debuggable APK. For security reasons you need to disable debugging before it can be published in Google Play

Make sure your manifest is set thus:

<application android:debuggable="false" android:hardwareAccelerated="true" android:icon="@drawable/icon" android:label="@string/app_name">

Resources

• https://github.com/DamianStanger/AndroidBuildScripts
• https://cordova.apache.org/docs/en/3.2.0/guide_cli_index.md.html#The%20Command-line%20Interface
• https://developer.android.com/tools/publishing/app-signing.html
• http://docs.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/technotes/tools/windows/jarsigner.html
• https://developer.android.com/tools/help/zipalign.html
• http://www.genymotion.com/