On Wed, 1 Aug 2007 17:46:55 +0000
Andy Smith <andy@???> wrote:
> I appreciate it's easy to say in hindsight, but, no, the moral of
> the story is:
>
> > (backup strategy = one DVD made in March 2005....)
>
> Have a better one of those. Mistakes always happen, they may not
> even be yours, software has bugs, can trash your files.
>
> Even if it's to another disk on the same machine, it's better than
> nothing.
I thought I'd use a usb attached hard drive I was given for backups
so I formatted it as ext2 and copied files to it. I then tried
reading the files and couldn't. No matter I thought I'll use some
other backup media.
Then I realised I'd hit F6 in mc rather than F5 for a couple of
directories, so had moved them rather than copied then and I couldn't
copy them back. I can't tell you what the error messages were as I
wiped the usb hard drive and have dumped it in a drawer, so cannot
re-attempt to copy files from it.
Luckily one directory contained a lot of data pdf files which I have
on the original CDs so was able to recover them but the other was a
directory containing images of things like birth certificates. I
have spent the last three hours trawling through emails looking for
those with attachments of such images.
I don't think I'll trust a usb hard disk for backup again. I will
have to get some CD-RW I think as they may be safer. Can't use DVD as
I don't have a DVD reader let alone writer :-(
--
John Lewis
Debian (Sid) with the GeneWeb genealogy package
