Following a partition resize gone awry, my Linux box has gone on a marathon 4-day fsck (disk repair) run. It still hasn’t recovered, and at this point I’m losing faith. My faith has been restored in two other things, though: regular backups and multi-platform open source software.
Retreating to the Windows machine that primarily runs iTunes, it’s been straightforward to reuse my Firefox and Thunderbird profiles. OpenOffice will happily read my financial spreadsheets, and the alpha of Sunbird even manages to open most of my Evolution iCalendar file.
May 29th, 2006 at 4:20 pm
[...] It took the better part of a week, but my computer has finally recovered from a scrambled partition. All my data is intact, though I was very happy to have a complete backup of everything that mattered. The experience, in addition to convincing me never to use a partition editor on anything but a blank drive, also made me think a bit more about data portability. Without another Linux system, some of my contacts and passwords still wouldn’t have been accessible. Exporting custom data to a common format would be a good addition to any backup scheme. [...]
May 29th, 2006 at 4:31 pm
[...] Merle commented that my comptuer problem had reminded her to do her own backups, so I thought I’d share my methods: [...]