Re: Lost my gramps data base ... help!

Sooner or later most tech users are burned by the backup practices they THOUGHT were sufficient.

I've had commercial software (whose ONLY purpose is automated backup) doing nightly archives to DAT (with validation) spontaneously & silently change configuration due to security patches. And only discovered that we had weeks of unusable incremental backups when performing a quarterly full restore test. 

Some earlier tests were unusable because they were tied to the hardware configuration. The archives were fine if restored to the same server. But if that box crashed & burned, the backup software refused to restore to a different serial number configuration of motherboard, processor ID, OS license & c: drive.

The lesson is that: no backup exists until it has been fully restored to a test box. Any backup you THINK is reliably stored off-site is smoke & mirrors until it is put to real world use.

-Brian
 
 
  On Mon, Feb 7, 2022 at 15:14, John Sibert<[email protected]> wrote:   Thanks to the gramps-users who replied to my recent plea for help. 
Ultimately, I was able to retrieve a .gramps backup file from one of the 
several backups that I had squirreled away on my NAS. So, everything 
seems to be more or less intact. I'm considering this episode to be a 
learning experience, and I thought I would share some of what I learned.

I have one computer, a laptop that runs linux. As its sole user, I had 
administrator (super user) privileges, and never bothered to create a 
specific administrator account. That was my first bungle. My second 
bungle was to fool around with a second account, change the the new 
account UID to my own (administrator) UID. Then I deleted the new 
account, and since it had my own UID, my account was deleted. Thus there 
was no user on the computer that could fix anything requiring 
administrator access. So now that I have a new OS, the computer has 2 
users with administrator privileges. *TIL: have a second administrator 
account.*

I have cron scripts that run daily to backup my home directory to (1) a 
NAS located in another room in our house and (2) to an remote service 
located far away. These steps ensure that if my computer is lost or its 
storage damaged, or if my house burns down, I will be able to retrieve 
at least some of my files. What could go wrong? First thing wrong: I 
modified my backup scripts so that when I needed them, the backed up 
files were not in the directories where I expected to find them. 
Instead, they were in a different directory. *TIL: verify that your 
backups script is putting things where you expect them. *Second thing 
wrong: I did not fully understand how gramps makes backups. In fact, i 
still have questions about how gramps makes backups. *TIL: Reread the 
documentation again.

*Now, to get back to my family history.

Thanks again and stay safe,
John

Contact me on Signal at +1 808 294 3842 (text, voice, or video; UTC -8)

On 1/30/22 2:10 PM, John Sibert wrote:
> Linux Mint 20.3 Una
> gramps 5.1.1
>
> Alas, I managed to delete my home directly, completely. I was the only 
> user with root privileges and was unable to effectively fix anything. 
> So after a long struggle session, committed upgrade on my OS and went 
> from Mint 19.3 to 10.3 (something I had been planning to do anyhow). I 
> keep habitual backups on an external NAS drive and was able to recover 
> most of the deleted files. I installed a fresh copy of gramps, but was 
> unable to recover my data base. All of the media files seem to be 
> pesent, but I can find no trace of the sql database. I did backups two 
> days before I lost anything, but they were media backups, hence no 
> database. I did find an older file, 
> Sibert-2019-2019-09-19-12-04-49.gramps, and imported it into gramps, 
> but it is two year out of date.
>
> One of several questions I have is where (ie directory and file) does 
> gramps write data when you "Quit" a gramps session?
>
> I have a couple of suggestions that might help other gramps users 
> avoid this dilemma, but I would really like to restore my database first.
>
> Any help would be gratefully received and rewarded with beer points.
>
> Regards,
> John
>
>
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