Tao Of Backup Wailing Wall Story
Demons are evil
After half a year without making backups, or doing cleanups, my disks were a mess. I finally got around to do a total bakcup: Every file was copied to an external disk, the main disk was wiped, and files were copied back selectively and properly grouped. Except that my mail files weren't there... Half a year of email, both incoming and outgoing, down the drain.
I did notice that the file count of copy was two or three below the file count on the original disk, but wrote it off as some system special files being ignored by the backup program and I never cared to look through the backup log of half a million files. Probably, what happened was that even if the mail UI was closed, a demon remained active, keeping the mail file open for writing, preventing the backup system from accessing it.
I never reboot unless there is a very good reason for it. Now I reboot before any total backup, to make sure no demons hold files so they cannot be backed up. And now, I always check that the backup is REALLY complete before I wipe the original disk.
ketil albertsen
Trondheim, Norway,
Mon 16-Apr-2007 1:47pm
