Re: Not staying installed correctly... (kinda long) -possibly solved

On Sun, 11 Mar 2012, Bradley D. Thornton wrote:

>>   Looks like I'm going to have to make sure my backup of my main hdd is
>> as up-to-date as I need ...

> ... running VirtualBox - especially if you want to sandbox something in an
> environment where you can just rollback to a previous snapshot until you
> get it right

   Take a close look at Dirvish (www.dirvish.org) for backups. It's a wrapper
around rsync and saves the differences in files so it does not consume a lot
of external drive space.

   Dirvish's documentation is a bit obtuse, but the help on the mail list
(extremely low volume) takes care of the questions.

   I turn on the external hard drice each evening when I log out, and the
cron job to run dirvish on all important partitions runs at 00:30 each day.

   On January 31st this year, the 15-month-old WD Caviar Black 500G hard
drive in my server failed about noon time. This was the first hard drive
failure I experienced since a Seagate ST-225 failed in 1991. And, the Black
is known to be a high-reliabillity drive with a 5-year warranty. Which, of
course, makes no difference when the drive fails.

   Anyway, I had to buy a replacement because my local vendor does the
warranty replacement for only the first 12 months (but WD sent me a brand
new 500G Caviar Black that's now a spare here.)

   I keep daily dirvish backups for 14 days (and the Sunday backups for 4
months), so I installed Slackware from the distribution DVD on the new hard
drive and used rsync to restore everything from the January 29th backup
(just in case there was something flaky on the 30th). I lost work done on
the morning of the 31st (including an invoice I sent a client, but they had
it and paid it) and all of January's sent-mail. Otherwise, I was back in
business (literally) the next morning.

   In the mid-1980s I made weekly backups on floppy diskc, then switched to
tape. A couple of years ago I gave up on tape becasuse the space was limited
and replacement cartridges cost about $75 each, and I used 3 of them. Got
dirvish installed using an external/USB2 320G hard drive and haven't looked
back.

Rich