The importance of backups...
So today, for the second time in a few months, I had a USB stick crap out on me. Either the fact that I use it quite a lot every day (I browse the internet from it, do my work from it, etc) or the college computers are just absolutely dreadful and are prone to corrupting flash drives. Whatever the reason, I lost a whole fucking assignment on the most BORING shit ever (writing about marketing strategies), as well as a whole access database (which is also terribly boring) :facepalm:
I backup whenever I remember, but obviously not enough. Anyway, I had to do all my lost work again which took a good few hours (which I could have otherwise been using to complete work which I actually should be doing, if I was on schedule).
BORING.
Anyway, lesson learned (again). BACK UP REGULARLY.
Now... What should I do with a totally bricked USB drive?
I backup whenever I remember, but obviously not enough. Anyway, I had to do all my lost work again which took a good few hours (which I could have otherwise been using to complete work which I actually should be doing, if I was on schedule).
BORING.
Anyway, lesson learned (again). BACK UP REGULARLY.
Now... What should I do with a totally bricked USB drive?
Comments
Fucking hell, that's a good idea. I'll ass it and then leave it in a computer at college :thumbsup: People always steal flash drives so maybe this will make their day a little shittier.
Did you know Dropbox works with symbolic links? So, in my ~/Dropbox folder I have a symbolic link to my ~/uni folder. Every file I create and every change I make, is recorded and stored online. You can even go back to previous revisions, share the files and recover deleted files. I accidentally deleted a report using rm, my last hard backup was too old. No problem, log onto dropbox and restore the file from 10mins ago.
Amazing. Though I do need to get around to building a Time Machine-esque backup system which backs up changes every 10mins... Summer project I guess...
Something else I've been meaning to do aswell, OSX has this feature were it periodically backs up all of the system file's permissions. If you ever fuck shit up you can just click "Repair file permissions" and it sorts them all out for you. For use in cases when you decide to:
Edit: Symbolic links are created using the ln command with the -s flag. 'man ln' for more info.
"Repair file permissions" fucked my HDD some months ago. My mac was a bit sluggish and after some clean-up, I figured booting the OS X DVD and verifying/repairing file permissions would help. After seeing my HDD in red in Disk Utlity, I had to run Onyx and the S.M.A.R.T status check gave me some error. I had to reinstall OS X all over again.
I don't believe I've seen any hacks for a flash drive that's already bricked though.
I was going to suggest DB as well. In Windows you can make any folder Dropbox folder, or you can just plug in your USB to your system and it will sync with your local system and at the same time it will sync with DB.
This is what dropbox does anyway. Whenever you change a file, it makes a record of that change and backs it up. Same as rsync, it copies only files that have changed.
Please feel free to edit the script to your own liking. Use it as more of a base for your own backup.
Also, man rsync.