[ale] Hard Drive Failures

[David Tomaschik]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2013 at 11:32 AM, Jonathan Meek
<jonathan.l.meek at gmail.com>wrote:

> Thanks for sharing your thoughts on backups. I hope I didn't give the
> impression that all was lost when my hard drive appears to have failed. I
> had everything backed up ahead of time but since I got it to boot one last
> time and it prompted me to backup I figured I would back it up since it is
> only data that I backup off my rigs. (Haven't started backing up any
> configuration stuff but that's for another time when I am not working full
> force on a master's degree)
>
> But in the future plan to implement the suggestions I see here.
>
> Regards,
>
> Jonathan
>

Hi Jonathan,

I hope you didn't take it that I was specifically targeting your post -- I
just happened to read your post while waiting on something else to finish
and it inspired me to write a message I'd been meaning to for a while.  The
topic of how to "burn in", "test", "repair", etc., hard drives has been a
frequent topic of discussion and I wanted to share my feelings on it.

Unlike JD and Ron (and others), I don't bother with anything resembling a
system image for desktop systems.  I backup a list of installed packages
and the contents of /etc, to be sure, but for the most part, I assume I'll
be doing a reinstall in my restore strategy, and I'm ok with that strategy.
 For servers, of course, images are nice, because downtime is more critical
there.

Good luck with the master's degree!

David
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