remember to backup - gosh darnit :)

[mardybear]

Stumbled on this in Distrowatch, appreciate their candor.

Perform regular backups and do it right . Personally don't bother with OS backups as Linux is generally fixable and a dead drive is a good excuse for an update, just /home configs and personal data. Stuff happens...even to the pros.

Last week fans of Linux Mint had been expecting to witness the launch of Linux Mint 17.3. Instead, visitors to the project's website encountered a message saying the distribution's website was off-line and would be back in a few days. On Friday, a message appeared on the Linux Mint blog explaining what had happened: "I would like to apologize for keeping you in the dark. You probably noticed our website and forums were down and even though it's early December, Linux Mint 17.3 isn't officially out yet. We've been hit by a series of disk issues on our main server and we made a critical mistake which resulted in data loss when trying to solve them. We then discovered our daily backups only covered part of what we lost. We're working day and night to recover the data and to bring everything back to normal." By the weekend most of the project's website was back on-line again and Linux Mint 17.3 had been released.

[dasein]

remember to backup - gosh darnit

Pretty salty language there, mardybear.

Reminders like this are always helpful. Backups are to computers what spare tires are to cars; never run without one.

[dasein]

I had to call in just about every favor owed to keep the sysadmin from losing his job.

One has to imagine that he was phenomenally good at something other than his job for you to want to keep him around.

[mardybear]

Sorry for the spicy language dasein, will take it down a notch Many new vehicles no longer come with spares. Removing useful features is all the trend, not just in software development: http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news ... /index.htm

Nice story wizard10000, good point about RAID.

Should clarify. With my Debian systems just back up some of /home, couple files from /etc and personal data. Some data is simply copied to another drive, non-sensitive uploaded to free cloud account and the most important stuff periodically burned and stored in a safety deposit box. Data backups need not be complicated, expensive or time consuming.

Tiny Core is probably the most nomadic OS i've ever used, just copy the entire installation (~200mb) to another physical drive once a week. Backup takes <5 minutes, would take hours or days to rebuild from source. Drive fail or OS issue, back online in minutes.

[edbarx]

With these days' hard disks, backing up data is no excusable omission. I often backup entire installations together with user data. In the event of a hard disk crash, I can restore everything as if nothing happened.

[Head_on_a_Stick]

GitHub FTW!