On Wed, Sep 28, 2005 at 01:07:29AM +1000, Oliver Jones wrote:
My Laptop's Hard Disk croaked yesterday. The device is less than a year old but it decided to destroy itself. No idea why. So backup early and often people. You will be thankful one day. I'm glad I have _any_ backup at all. Even if it is 3 or more months old.
Backups are one of those things you keep telling yourself you should really do at some point... For people who have their own LAN at home, maybe just a desktop and a server, I recommend using 'rsync' to make a copy of any important directories across the network. If you are at all familiar with 'scp', then rsync is very similar to use, but has the advantage that it won't re-copy over any files that already exist unless they have changed. Actually getting around to writing a quick backup script also helps you think about which data on your computer is worth keeping "forever". For me it turned out that the only really critical stuff I'd want to keep is my digital photos. The /etc directory is useful too, although I could recreate similar config files myself. I wouldn't be able to recreate my photos. If you have a LAN, but don't know how to use command-line tools like scp/rsync, you can browse across your network in gnome by opening a location such as "ssh://servername/home/username". If you don't have a LAN, write stuff to CDs. See the wiki page http://www.wlug.org.nz/BackupNotes for more links/ideas and (as always) feel free to add to the page if you have questions or contributions. John