Alright, so today I wanna chat about this little project I’ve been wrestling with, something I ended up calling “yzysply”. Don’t ask me what it stands for, it’s just a silly name that stuck in my head while I was pulling my hair out.
It all started because, man, my old way of keeping things safe, my important files and stuff, was a total joke. Seriously. I had a bunch of different scripts, some half-baked cloud sync things, and notes scribbled on bits of paper. If one thing failed, I wouldn’t know for days. It was a ticking time bomb, and honestly, a real pain to even think about.
Getting My Hands Dirty
So, one weekend, after nearly losing some important photos – don’t ask – I just snapped. I said, “Enough is enough. I’m building my own thing.” That’s where “yzysply” began its life. My goal wasn’t to make something super fancy, just something that worked, reliably, and in a way I understood. No black boxes.
First off, I tried to be clever. I thought, “I’ll just stitch together some existing tools, make a quick Frankenstein monster.” Bad idea. That fell apart faster than a cheap suit in the rain. Things wouldn’t talk to each other, one part would update and break another. Classic.
So, back to the drawing board. I actually sat down with a pen and paper, old school, and listed out what I needed:
- What to save: My documents, project code, those precious photos, game saves – the works.
- Where to put it: Needed a couple of spots. A local drive for quick access, and something offsite, just in case the house decided to float away.
- How often: Some things daily, others weekly. Didn’t want it running all the time, bogging things down.
- And crucially: I needed to KNOW if it worked or if it choked. Silent failures were my biggest enemy.
The Nitty-Gritty
I decided to go with a core script, something I could build upon. Spent a good few evenings just getting the basic copying mechanism right. Lots of trial and error here. You’d think copying files is simple, but oh boy, permissions, weird file names, long paths – they all came out to play. I must have typed chmod and chown a thousand times.
Then came the “where to put it” part. The local bit was easy enough. For offsite, I fiddled with a couple of cloud storage command-line tools. That was a learning curve. Each one had its own quirks, its own way of authenticating. Found one that was scriptable enough without making me want to throw my computer out the window.
The notification part, believe it or not, took me ages. I didn’t want fancy emails at first, just a simple log file that was easy to read. But then I thought, “What if I forget to check the log?” So, I dug into sending a little pop-up message to my desktop. Sounds trivial, but making it work reliably across different situations was a head-scratcher. I remember spending a whole Saturday afternoon just on that, muttering to myself. My dog thought I’d lost it.
And the testing! Oh, the testing. I’d set it up, then deliberately delete a source file, or fill up the destination drive, or even yank the network cable mid-transfer. I wanted to see “yzysply” complain, tell me what went wrong, and hopefully, recover gracefully if possible. More often than not, in the early days, it just sulked or crashed. But each failure taught me something.
Finally, Some Peace of Mind
After what felt like forever – probably a few solid weeks of tinkering in my spare time – “yzysply” started to behave. It would run on schedule, copy what it needed to, verify it, and then quietly tell me everything was okay. The first time it ran flawlessly for a whole week, doing its thing without any intervention, I tell you, it was a good feeling. Like, a really good feeling.
Now, “yzysply” just hums along. It’s not the prettiest code, I’m sure some pro would laugh at it. It’s probably a bit over-engineered for what it does. But it’s my system. I built it, I understand every line of it (well, most lines), and I trust it. And that, folks, is a kind of satisfaction you just can’t buy off the shelf. My digital life feels a bit safer, and I got to learn a whole lot in the process. Totally worth the initial headaches.
