Eric S. Raymond:

Last night I made a classic n00b mistake. I was in a rush to get a test finished because my wife had just gotten home and it was time for us to haul off for the weekly Friday night with the regulars at our friendly local game store. I typed the rm -fr * to clear a scratch directory in the wrong window.

“Huh…” I thought, “that’s ( Read more... )

Number 9... number 9... number 9...

Yesterday i talked about backups, and listed some backup tools. Today i would like to take a slightly higher-level look at backup systems.

The two technologies which form the basis of backup systems are archives and mirroring.

Archives. An archive is a file which contains other files; it is a sort of miniature ( Read more... )

Last time, i talked about the importance of backups. Today, i will survey some backup tools.
tar

The venerable UNIX utility. "tar" stands for "Tape ARchive". My understanding is that, in the old days, you would tar up your files every night and write the archive to a magnetic tape drive-tape being one of the most reliable storage methods (if stored ( Read more... )

Everyone tells you that you should have backups. "Yes, I should," you think. "Maybe I'll set those up next month 1." For you are a busy person, and besides, nothing bad has happened so far. You are smart enough not to run rm -rf /. Right?

Wrong. It happened to me, and it could happen to you.

Let me set the scene.

The date is 2010-07-05, and the time ( Read more... )