Bash on windows: a great unix backup tool

I’m using the bash on windows (WSL) every day now to take a snapshot of my unix-based web sites.

Given that most people have a windows machine with a huge disk, WSL is a great way to take a snapshot of unix directories using a familiar interface – rsync/ssh.

Here is a line from a backup script that runs under bash under windows.

/usr/bin/rsync -avz --delete ec2-1-2-3-4.compute.amazonaws.com:/home/bitnami/htdocs/ ~/backups/

This asks rsync to copy a directory off an EC2 directory, and mirror it locally.

rsync will use a profile entry in the ~/.ssh/config file to provide the ssh certificate at run time in order to login and encrypt the rsync session.

Host ec2-1-2-3-4.compute.amazonaws.com
  IdentityFile ~/.ssh/ec2-secret.pem
  User ubuntu

This shows rsync which .pem file to use to login to the EC2 instance.

It doesn’t run as fast as a pure linux box would but certainly fast enough for my purposes.

Loving WSL !

Sendy, Amazon EC2 t2.micro: 50 emails a second

Now that my main email group has over 5,000 members I decided to see if I could 1) get Amazon SES to up my sending rate and 2) whether an Amazon EC2 t2.micro could keep up with 50 sends a second.

The previous send rate was 20/sec and it seemed just fine and wasn’t such a problem, but as the list grows 50 seems much useful.

So the good new is that according to watching the status updates as a campaign goes out, and eyeballing the per-second updates, the t2.micro kept up really well and I’ll keep the rate at 50/sec going forward.

So Amazon EC2 t2.micro, sendy.co and Amazon SES is a really good cheap option for running a decent sized email list.