Is it possible to restore a single file or directory from a backup?
I was recently in the same situation, it actually happened a little bit before Sep 4 and so I didn't have the benefit of looking at this thread. But I tried it anyway, just to see how Slicehost would handle it. I allocated a new slice sourced from the previous night's backup of my production slice. I scp'd my lost files back over to the production slice and then told Slicehost to delete the new slice. It took about 20 minutes to wait for the new slice to allocate, 10 minutes to retrieve my files, and 10 seconds to deallocate the new slice. Cost to me: 66 cents.
I don't know what these guys are thinking. With customer-friendly policies like these, how will they ever have a successful IPO?
Google Chrome
John Gruber is on target when he says it sounds more like an application runtime than a browser. But the key point is that it is an application runtime optimized for the kinds of web applications that already exist. They're not trying to make a "next generation" browser like Ubiquity or push some new kind of embedded applet ("Rublets - now you can make RIAs with Ruby!") Based on this one comic book-style presentation, Chrome is monomaniacally focused on making the existing crop of HTML+Javascript+AJAX based web applications run like lightning. And by extension, expand the viability of that platform into the near-term future. Which makes sense, considering how much Google has invested into that platform. Reading between the lines, it seems like the Google Gears developers said "here's what we could do with Gears, but the existing browsers are too slow/too crude/etc." So someone at Google said "fine, let's make our own browser so that the Gears guys can go nuts."
