April « 2006 « Luke’s Life

More on backups

Posted in geeky by lrobison on April 19, 2006

One other thing i forgot: del.icio.us the social bookmarking site.

All my bookmarks, tutorials, blogs and interesting sites are saved there. And firefox has a great plugin called foxylicious that imports those bookmarks to your local firefox bookmark folder. It works quite nicely if you use tag bundles.

sad face

Posted in geeky by lrobison on April 18, 2006

My laptop hard drive just crashed last night. completely dead.
It started with a whiring clicking sound, thats when i got suspicious. I scrambled to back up my project, but all file accesses just hung forever, waiting for a response from the HD. then the system froze. I tried to reboot, but was faced with “No bootable devices found”.
Now I have to restart my graphics project. I’ve lost my recently written memory debugger, and lots and lots of other small utilities. I think other than programming i don’t even care about anything else that was on there. Except my private GPG key. Which brings up an interesting point: If your GPG key is on a hard drive that crashed, any emails/file encoded with it went down with the hard drive. So how do you keep a private, yet redundant copy of a GPG key? i guess more hard drives… maybe a raid1. This is my second laptop harddrive to crash, although the first one gave me more time to save stuff. I should really learn to be more religous about my backups.

On the plus side:
i use IMAP, no emails are lost
I copy projects to the CS servers for testing and submission, no old cs code was lost
my important pictures are on flickr

so really the only things I cared about loosing were the other pictures not posted to flickr, and the CS projects that i had not yet completed. The utilities that i had laying around (like that fancy new memory debugger) will also be missed.

Daddy always told me to backup. Moral of the story is listen to your dad.

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