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For some years I semi-regularly backed up my computers to tape. This is actually pretty inconvenient, but I never had to restore.
At the beginning of this year I switched to a disk-based backup scheme, using a program of my own devising, originally in Python but now with a C++ implementation as well.
Since then, I've used this software to restore my laptop (which was stolen); to preserve ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
naath's files across a reinstall; to recover the configuration of my firewall (which failed roughly a month ago) in order to replicate it on another machine; to save (but not yet to restore) lnr's files, though they're still hopefuly on her hard disk as well; and to restore my home directory on my desktop PC, a bunch of files having been smashed by (I think) a new kernel, and though diff hasn't finished running yet so far it's looking like the only files damaged were in /usr and so already restored via dpkg.
While repeatedly discovering that my backup software works well is gratifying, I am left wondering why I've needed it three times this year, in addition to the times it's merely been useful, when I've had so little pressing need for backups for many years previously.
Time passes
Feb. 13th, 2006 12:32 amRib not fixed but it's definitely been causing a lot less trouble lately, particularly over the weekend. Back into the office tomorrow morning, I think.
Had a nice walk on Saturday, having a look at this ruined folly with Becky. We couldn't (legitimately l-) get inside but we could see that it's just brickwork clad with stone rather than stone all the way through. Very few people around Wimpole Hall this time of year, previous times I've been there it's been much busier. Curry and Xena later on. They seem to have abandoned any notion that the widely-appreciated subtext is actually sub- for season six.
(I still have photos from last weekend's walk, among other things, waiting to be posted.)
I've spent quite a bit of time this weekend improving my backup software. It's now capable of backing over SFTP to a remote host, though I came across an annoying problem with OpemSSH's sftp along the way. Still, apart from that it went pretty smoothly. (For the intrepid and Arch-enabled, get rjk@greenend.org.uk--2004/hbackup--mainline--0.)
I've also made another release of lj2news, which can be used to post LJ articles into a newsgroup.
