Faulty Software Updater on 16.04

[Dr Rainer Woitok]

Bret,

On Wednesday, 2017-10-11 13:59:21 +0800, you wrote:

> ...
> I did not create a backup before I refreshed firefox, so, I assume
> that I do not have either of the backups.
> 
> My home directory (I assume that is what is meant by $HOME) uses about
> 48GB, of which about 18.5GB is my alpine mail directory.

Wow!  48 GB of absolutely unimportant data, because if they were import-
ant, backups would exist.   Having 18.5 GB  in some "alpine mail direct-
ory" without having any backups of it simply is beyond me.

Backups do not only help out when a disk goes belly-up but also when you
accidentally mangle or discard a file.

And you don't  necessarily need  commercial backup software.   There's a
"poor man's" alternative:  good ol' "tar".   It features a "--listed-in-
cremental" option,  allowing for incremental backups,  that is, for pro-
cessing only what has changed since the last backup.  With that and per-
haps the help of a few  little homebrew shell scripts  you can easily do
regular backups every evening or once a week, depending on your needs.

I currently do backup on two 64 GB USB sticks  having identical contents
(to limit  the risk of  unreadable backups),  and if the  overall backup
size will increase in the future, these USB sticks will be replaced with
128 GB USB sticks or even with SSDs.

Sincerely,
 Rainer