2004.05_Timing.pdf

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Timing

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Dear Linux Magazine Reader,

Ever had one of

those days, every-

thing you touch

seems to go

wrong? A col-

league phoned to

say that after he

had sent some

mail his hard drive had died. He wanted

to know had I received the mail. Fortu-

nately the mail had got through. The

dead hard drive did not pull through

though.

He explained that calling was not to

give me schadenfreude – glee in others

misfortune – but more to put things in

perspective. Having spent the day fight-

ing with floppy disk sized distros, it was

nothing to the frustration of losing your

main machines hard disk.

At companies I always preach back-

ups. I assume everyone is of the same

mind in that it makes obvious sense. In

business it is a quantifiable risk, so you

are more likely to spend the money and

buy a backup solution. This can be any-

thing from DVD writers to the usual DAT

tape systems.

At home the issue becomes a little

more clouded. Other things take prece-

dence for your hard earned money such

as food, a new bike, or even beer. The

choice is often down to a new shiny

piece of hardware that will boost your

systems power and efficiency, or some

boring backup method.

Like everyone else I have good inten-

tions. Little discipline means that

whenever I buy a second hard disk I find

it quickly becomes full of other data

rather than backup archives. Admittedly

disk prices are falling as bigger drives

come on the market, but there is always

the temptation of new data to store.

Spurred on to actually do something

about by lack of recent backups, I

unearthed all my old tape drives. A

quick search found that the media was

now uncommon and as a result expen-

sive. Time to get serious with just what I

need as a backup.

I have just over half a TeraByte of stor-

age at home. This is not unusual and I

know many colleagues with multiple

Te r aBytes on a home system.

Linux distributions can always be pur-

chased – so there is no need to back

those up. MP3 music accounts for over

200GBytes but is not vital as it is all on

real CDs somewhere – obviously a gen-

eral sort out and collation will be

required at a later date.

Photos add about 40GBytes, as

although some are from wet cameras,

the digital images have no other

medium. Personal email at 10GB for me

is a must for backup. Bookmarks and

addressbooks are vital along with my

PGP revoke file. These however are kept

on PDAs with backup to Flash storage.

Te xt files that would take time to regen-

erate only add a few megabytes.

I need a 50+GByte solution which is

only one tenth of my used storage. All

the files are mirrored onto other drives

and machines, but the idea is to avoid

panic and worry. Photos were eventually

uploaded over a few nights to three sepa-

rate free web space locations. Letting

someone else handle day to day back-

ups, although I will get around to buying

another drive and being more disci-

plined.

Email is the only problem. I have a

habit of saving every email. I even have

to force myself to empty the spam fold-

ers. None of the mail is too personal, but

I would obviously rather some people

did not get to see some particular emails,

taken out of context could hurt their feel-

ings. With this in mind I did not want to

place on a web server waiting for some

future search engine to access and open

to the world. Fourteen CDs later I felt a

little more comfortable.

Drinking hot chocolate with a smug

look on my face I glanced at an open

machines motherboard. To my fascina-

tion and horror I watch five capacitors

next to the processor all expand, crack

and leak. For what seemed like spite, but

was probably down to age and heat. The

machine is still running although I am a

little nervous of rebooting. Even if the

board dies the hard disks are fine, but

timing is everything. Time for me to start

backing up regularly

Trust all is well

John Southern

Editor

www.linux-magazine.com

May 2004

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