[plug] installing linux cont.

[Brad Campbell]

Cameron Patrick wrote:

> I remember the story you posted to the list a few years ago about your
> laptop, dodgy hard drive and failed backups.  Can't have been fun for
> you at the time but it's made me very careful about making sure I always
> have backups of my own machines!

Oh I had forgotten about that.. yes, that was horrific and the amount of data I lost was bordering 
on ugly.. thank goodness for fsck, grep and various other ugly, hard to use command line utilities 
(and about a weeks worth of time).

I might have forgotten about the event but to this day my fixed machines get a daily rsync backup 
and my laptops get a backup every 2 days when I'm at home, and pre/post trips to/from the airport 
when I travel.. And I'm anal about it.. "No sweetheart we can't go to the airport just yet, my 
machine is not quite finished its backup".

In the prior post I was of course referring to doing other stuff.. but backups are *always* a good 
idea.. I've got a 250GB file loopback mounted on one of my servers that my laptop rsyncs to and I've 
got over six months of daily incremental backups on there.. My mail spool is really the only part of 
the laptop disk that can be relied on to change regularly..

Using rsync in combination with cp -al ensures that at any time I have a complete image suitable for 
a cp -al restore if I should require it..

I'm doing some forensic recovery work on a friends machine at the moment and even the backup from 
that runs to over 110GB compressed.. backups require large amounts of storage, but honestly after 
being the victim just that one time.. it's cheap insurance. Just ask the dude who dropped his laptop 
and noticed all the bits had fallen off the platter that comprised his wedding photos, childs birth 
and photos up to age 2, and childs videos.. and he had no backups..

Brad
-- 
"Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability
to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable
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