Apr 29 2007
Hard drive! Mercy!
So, in the midst of travel, taxes, and many other exciting things, I lost my hard drive two weeks ago. And not only that, but it was a surprise, overnight failure. Friday night it worked, Saturday it was dead, and I had no warning.
So, be warned, and backup! You can loose your HD at any time, without warning!
It turns out that my MacBook restore CD fails to boot, and as a result, I’ve installed Ubuntu 7.04 “Feisty Fawn” on my laptop. It works, and lets me do what I need to do… email and some writing, mostly.
Sometimes with backup you need to balance how practical it is cause it can be time consuming when you have a lot of data. Best way is to backup only what you know you couldn’t live without. I’ve actually been building a site on data recovery.
http://www.datarecoveryadvice.org if there’s any articles you would like me to cover let me know.
Hm. Yes, and no. Generally speaking, I want my backup to be complete and automatic. If it isn’t complete, I might forget there’s something I want to backup. If it isn’t automatic, I might forget to run it.
Anything that requires me to think about my backups is a Bad Plan. My new office machine, for example, will have an external drive the same size as the internal drive. It will be a daily mirror, and exist to save me when the internal drive takes a dump; I’ll just boot from the external, instead.
This isn’t an archive, and it might not save me from deleting files, but it will save me from the class of disaster that is most disruptive to my daily work: hard drive failure.