Backup

Failed hard drives are inevitable. Especially when the drive in question was manufactured on November 27, 2001. You know the time has come to replace it when your log files start filling up with errors like this: Oct 28 03:53:05 cat kernel: res 51/40:00:fc:33:4e/00:00:00:00:00/e0 Emask 0x9 (media error) Oct 29 16:06:46 cat smartd[24427]: Device: /dev/sdb [SAT], FAILED SMART self-check. BACK UP DATA NOW! Failure is inescapable. Everything fails eventually, computers, people, electronics.

A few (ahum) years ago I wrote an article for Linux Journal on building a RAID system. While that exact system no longer exists, I do still have a RAID5 setup that I use with BackupPC to backup all the systems on my LAN. As I wrote about in my KVM article, I have updated my main Linux box to Fedora11. It had been out of backup rotation for about a year, since I have mostly been using my Mac Mini and everything on the Linux box was checked out of a remote Subversion repository.