[scribus] Drat !!

[John Culleton]

On Thursday 22 May 2008 04:20:05 pm jwminer at accessvt.com wrote:
> John C. wrote:
> > I have two hard drives, and use a surge protector. The
> > newest/biggest hard drive is for work and the older/smaller one
> > is for experiments with different distributions and more
> > pertinently for my two backup partitions.  Overnight my work
> > files (/usr/local and /home ) are backed up to partitions on
> > drive number 2.
> >
> > About every three years I buy a still newer and bigger drive. The
> > oldest drive is retired, the remaining drive is demoted to backup
> > duty and the newest is now the daily work drive.  I buy hardware
> > from Tiger Direct.
> >
> > I have a mid-tower computer and I run Linux primarily.  With a
> > laptop and/or MSWin things get more complicated.
> >
> > I only lose files through gross stupidity.  No hard drive
> > failures since I went on a three-year rotation.  Hardware is
> > cheap, data is (or are) expensive.
>
> This sounds like an excellent plan. I feel compelled to point out,
> however, that ANY drive can fail at ANY time without warning. And
> that means exactly what it says. A 2-day-old drive can fail (early
> death). A 1-year-old drive can fail. And of course, the older a
> drive is the more likely it is to fail, although I'm sure there are
> 10-year-old drives that are still going strong (though so slow and
> small that I wonder why anyone would use one).
>
> We all need to keep this in mind and be sure that anything we'd
> hate to lose is backed up at least to the point that we wouldn't
> jump off a cliff if we lost the work we'd done since our last
> backup. Sometimes this may mean copying to a flash drive or another
> physical drive in the system as we work.
>
> I also suggest using an uninterruptible power supply instead of a
> surge protector. 
I misspoke. I have a UPS, two in fact.  These act as surge protectors 
also.  

If I had a drive fail my critical data would be backed up. If it 
failed one hour after installation it would still be backed up. 
Remember the backup drive used to be a primary drive, and the 
directories for /,  /usr/local and /home are still on it.  That data 
is still there. It will be refreshed overnight of course. 

It is a fact that no drive has failed since I went on a three year 
rotation.   With a mirror copy of all critical files on the backup 
drive at all times both drives will have to fail simultaneously to 
cost me any significant amount of data. The loss of one day's work 
wouldn't destroy me.  I would simply have to do it over. 

-- 
John Culleton
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