Robert A. Uhl

For years now I’ve known that I need backups; I’ve worried that sooner or later the hour would come when they would be necessary. I RAID my drives, but that just provides redundancy and protects against disk failure; it does nothing to protect against human or software error. At one point I even bought a SCSI tape drive off of eBay, but it never quite worked properly.

Well, last night disaster struck. While in the midst of trying to install some software, I tried to clean up a directory in my home, and due to a my fingers anticipating what was not there, I ended up running the fabled horror command rm -rf ~ (for those who don’t know, ~ is one’s home directory). When it took a fraction of time longer than I expected, I looked at it again and immediately killed it with C-c, but by that stage I’d already lost a lot of things. Among them are:

• .emacs, my emacs configuration — fortunately .emacs~, the most

recent backup, survived

• .gnus, my gnus configuration — again, .gnus~ survived
• .emacs.d, a directory full of custom emacs hacks I’d written —

gone forever

• apparently all of my saved papers from college
• many of my LaTeX files
• many of my PDFs

Fortunately, none of this is a truly great deal, although I was actually quite proud of some of those papers from senior year. In my line of work, I should — and do — know better than to not have backups. Sigh. Well, I’ve ordered a 500GB external hard drive which I’ll be using for complete backups, in the interim I’ve adapted the regimen recommended at Easy Automated Snapshot-Style Backups with rsync.

So at least my home directory will be safe in the future. I am so ticked off at myself …