[clug] Backups

[Adam Thomas]

Hi List,

Everyone please go and make a backup of any data you care about. If
you have backups go and test that they have all your data and that
they extract okay...

I just had a fright after telling a new SATA controller that it should
export each of my disks as 'single' volumes not even thinking that it
might blow away my data. The damn thing even warned me. I tried to
back out of the changes but it had already written them to the disks.

Turns out all it scrubbed was the partition table which after running
TestDisk[0] on each drive I was able to recover. Each partition mounts
happily now and running tree over the mount point gave me a happy
listing of all of my files so it looks like nothing got too messed up.
I guess first access will tell for sure.

I'm off to tar up my home drive and some of the other more important
things before I try and build the software RAIDs again which will
separate out my home and general files from my media files and give me
the contiguous space I need to run those nightly backups I've been
putting off.

-- Adam.

[0] http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk

P.S. The backup I did on 2007-07-10 had most of the stuff I care about
but that's not really very comforting.
P.P.S. Someone write up a page where I can buy everyone a virtual
round of beer for making such a stupid mistake. Google didn't bring up
anything useful.