Backing up.

[David Fletcher]

On Monday 17 Nov 2008, Paul Lemmons wrote:
> 
> Man, for a programmer, I sure am backup stupid. I live the same world
> as the guy that said his drive had not failed in 11 years. Last time I
> had a true disk failure was with windows xp (LONG time ago).
> 
>   

That was me :-) and I've had several drives since then and none of them has 
yet failed.

I remember it well - it was Windows 98 I think - I'd been away on company 
business for a week, pushed the start button to let the beast warm up while I 
started emptying the suitcase etc, and heard those dreaded three consecutive 
beeps from the computer room. The monitor showed little other than "General 
failure reading drive C".

BUT I'd made a backup of my essential files before I went away. Used WinZip in 
those days, I think, but it did the job.

I think the message I'd like to put out is, it matters not what you use to 
take a backup, but after you've done it, no matter what you've used, for 
goodness sake CHECK THAT IT WORKED. I make sure that my tar.gz successfully 
extracts, after being encrypted, written to a flash drive and read back 
again. I also take extra copies of that file on more flash drives to take off 
site. Paranoid? Maybe. Safe? I believe so.

Take your backups as often as you feel comfortable with. My home computer 
usually gets done monthly, and anything that I really don't want to loose 
such as an updated kwallet file can be copied onto a flash drive any time.

OTOH I've configured the subversion server at work to do a dump of all 
repositories, copied to the engineering server, every weekday night, and 
weekly copies of anything that changes. And, yes, I know that the dump files 
restore properly. I've tested it and have a script to do it automatically, 
once a new server is set up and running.

Dave



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