diaryman VS litestream

Shameless plug of basically the same idea except as a pip package:

https://github.com/Aperocky/diarycli

`pip install diarycli`

Alternatively there is a shell version if you are averse to python/pip package manager as well:

https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh

I've been using this for years, it doesn't have any fancy features - it only reliably opens up/create today's diary in vim whenever I type `diary` in command line. with some minor utilities.

Shameless plug on the same subject if you are vim user fond of terminal:

https://github.com/Aperocky/diarycli

`pip install diarycli`

Alternatively there is a shell version if you are averse to python/pip package manager as well:

https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh

The only way I can get myself to write things down is to have it one commands away in the terminal.

Diary script.

`$ diary` create/open a file for today's diary in vim: https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh

Or try `pip install diarycli`: https://github.com/Aperocky/diarycli, for a pip packaged python version that does the exact same thing.

I've actually kept diary and work logs, things I did not know I was capable of.

Having had good usage and some positive feedback on https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh, I decided to pack it into a pip package.

Essentially, all this does is to make creating diary super simple in the CLI, and resulting diary organized in a nice /diary/year/month/date.md hierarchy.

Having used this for a few years, I find this tool indispensable - I was never able to write diary consistently but once it was available via `diary` it became nature to utilize this to manage daily tasks at work and write personal reflections at home.

> For example, my oldest files were made in Microsoft Word on an iMac G3 running Mac OS 9. I can open them in a modern word processor, and they look similar – but it’s not the same. Some of the fonts and graphics are missing, and I don’t know where I’d find replacements.

> It’s even harder for an undocumented side project I abandoned years ago. Having the code isn’t the same as a working application.

The author's solution to this is apparently screenshots, I have to respectfully disagree.

For software, side project or not, it should probably come with dependency configurations (granted, in early 2000s this isn't as mature as it is today) and some tests. My side projects basically all have tests, these tests are vital for picking up years later and for validation while developing.

For personal notes, I use this script which upon `$ diary` would create/open an entry for the current day in the appropriate folder with vim: https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh. Text files will last forever, it has some basic flavoring with markdown, but that's it. The folder where this is indexed is without a doubt the most valuable data on my computer, and it stretches back years.

I do occasionally take screenshots but never for reasons that author find screenshot to be useful for.

For the unix fundamentalist out here:

https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh

I had this little script aliased from shell, whenever I type `diary` it creates/open the current days' note file in vim.

Here's my note taking system: https://github.com/Aperocky/diaryman/blob/master/diaryman.sh

Whenever I type `diary` in the terminal, it opens vim on a text file that corresponds to today. All of the diary files are nicely ordered in directory structure that goes $DIARY_ROOT/$year/$month/$day.md

It worked very well for me over years.

I have not, but I keep meaning to collate everything I've learned into a set of useful defaults just to remind myself what settings I should be enabling and why.

Regarding Litestream, I learned pretty much all I know from their documentation: https://litestream.io/

This presentation is focused on the use-case of vertically scaling a single server and driving everything through that app server, which is running SQLite embedded within your application process.

This is the sweet-spot for SQLite applications, but there have been explorations and advances to running SQLite across a network of app servers. LiteFS (https://fly.io/docs/litefs/), the sibling to Litestream for backups (https://litestream.io), is aimed at precisely this use-case. Similarly, Turso (https://turso.tech) is a new-ish managed database company for running SQLite in a more traditional client-server distribution.

This post intends to help you setup replication for SQLite using Litestream.

I've been messing around with litestream. It is so cool. And, I either found a bug in the -timestamp switch or don't understand it correctly.

What I want to do is time travel into my sqlite database. I'm trying to do some forensics on why my web service returned the wrong data during a production event. Unfortunately, after the event, someone deleted records from the database and I'm unsure what the data looked like and am having trouble recreating the production issue.

Litestream has this great switch: -timestamp. If you use it (AFAICT) you can time travel into your database and go back to the database state at that moment. However, it does not seem to work as I expect it to:

https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/issues/564

I have the entirety of the sqlite database from the production event as well. Is there a way I could cycle through the WAL files and restore the database to the point in time before the records I need were deleted?

Will someone take sqlite and compile it into the browser using WASM so I can drag a sqlite database and WAL files into it and then using a timeline slider see all the states of the database over time? :)

We're using SQLite in production very heavily with millions of databases and fairly high operations throughput.

But we did run into some scariness around trying to use Litestream that put me off it for the time being. Litestream is really cool but it is also very much a cool hack and the risk of database corruption issues feels very real.

The scariness I ran into was related to this issue https://github.com/benbjohnson/litestream/issues/510

Litestream is a library that allows you to easily create backups. You can probably just do analytic queries on the backup data and reduce load on your server.

https://litestream.io/

One possible strategy is to have one directory/file per customer which is one SQLite file. But then as the user logs in, you have to look up first what database they should be connected to.

OR somehow derive it from the user ID/username. Keeping all the customer databases in a single directory/disk and then constantly "lite streaming" to S3.

Because each user is isolated, they'll be writing to their own database. But migrations would be a pain. They will have to be rolled out to each database separately.

One upside is, you can give users the ability to take their data with them, any time. It is just a single file.

[0]. https://litestream.io/

Upstream Kuma uses a local SQLite database to store account data, configuration for services to monitor, notification settings, and more. To make sure that our data is available across redeploys, we will bundle Uptime Kuma with Litestream, a project that implements streaming replication for SQLite databases to a remote object storage provider. Effectively, this allows us to treat the local SQLite database as if it were securely stored in a remote database.