One of the reasons for my recent posting hiatus — thanks for filling in Louise! — has been the near demise of our desktop. Recently, when I rebuilt it with the latest version of Ubuntu, I took the opportunity to put in a new, larger hard drive. Well, I say “new” but it was… liberated, shall we say, from its former home. Anyway, it turns out that it was a bit dodgy and one day when Louise booted the desktop it went into a tailspin, ending in a rather unglamorous text-only black-and-white screen á la WarGames.
I was able to maintain my tech-guru reputation by a few incantations of fsck, bringing the desktop back to life. However, I don’t think the drive will last much longer, so I’ve plugged the old drive in as well and I’m using rsync to make daily(ish) backups.
We nearly lost a large batch of our photos because of this… Do your backups, kids! This was a sobering experience and backups is something I’ll be taking more seriously in future. If you’re an Ubuntu user and you’re not sure where to start, you could do worse than read BackupYourSystem.
Tags: technology