Post #1047022

I'm going to share a gentle reminder because I had a big scare yesterday. It's about backups. I'll rewind a bit. I currently make backups to external USB hard drives. It's not a perfect plan because it's slow, but other than that, it should be a good plan. However, my backup plan has two flaws. First, it isn't automatic. I have backups from whenever I chose to make them. Second, I hadn't made any recently because I had been meaning to diagnose what caused them to fail. And third of two, I'd done a huge amount of work in the past month that wasn't backed up. My plan was to start backing up to my new NAS as soon as I got it running. Unfortunately, the drives I got for it were incompatible with the enclosure. Honestly, what manufacturer thinks it's a good idea to have two models of drives, one SAS and one SATA whose model numbers differ by 1 digit and that digit is a 2 for one model and a 3 for the other. And my hand writing wasn't completely clear. I have the replacements on order. But the fact that I hadn't made backups last month is on me, not them. So, I had an issue with my laptop. It's almost certainly a minor hardware failure with the drive. It hung. This isn't my first rodeo. I know how to use the Linux magic SysRq REISUB sequence. And on reboot ... it didn't. Secure boot didn't like the kernel. The words "kernel panic" can mean two thing. The first is the official version. The second is what I did when this happened. Eventually my heartrate returned to low triple digits per minute and I booted from the previous kernel version. Overnight, I made the backup I should have had already. Now I'm making a second one on a separate drive. So, now the gentle reminder. 1) Make backups 2) Make them regularly 3) Test that you can restore from them 4) Have copies on multiple separate media I know better than to make the mistakes I did. I got lucky.