08:11
- I see there is now discussion of using the National Guard to patrol the Mexican border.
Frist is by all accounts an intelligent man, so he must realize that
this can at most very slightly reduce the porosity of our southern border. Patrolling
something like 2,000 miles of border is not something that the National
Guard is prepared by training or equipment to handle, particularly with
the tiny numbers being suggested. I've seen figures as low as 3,000
National Guard troops, or about 1.5 troops per mile. With the current state of
border defenses, which is to say essentially none, it would require at
least 20 divisions to seal 2,000 miles
of border effectively. (Obviously, one division can't hold 100 miles of
front against any military opponent, but in this case it wouldn't be
facing enemy armor or even infantry.) We don't have 20 divisions available for such duties. We don't have 20 divisions, period.
The only feasible long-term solution is to establish a security fence
that extends continuously from the Gulf of Mexico east of Brownsville,
Texas to the Pacific Ocean south of San Diego. That security fence
needn't be particularly expensive to build, relative to the costs we
already bear as a result of illegal aliens crossing our borders.
All that's really needed is a double-row concertina barrier near the border,
with a heavily-mined gap between the rows. Liberal use of electronic
sensors would minimize the number of troops required to watch and
defend the fence. Behind the fence, extending for 10 miles, would be a
dead zone, also mined, in which anything that moved would be fired on
without warning. Helicopter gunships and artillery firing cluster
munitions would serve to further discourage would-be border crossers.
Anything shot would be left to rot, pour l'encouragement des autres.
Finally, a third fence ten miles back would delimit the dead zone.
Constructing such a security fence would cost a few billion
dollars, much less than what we already pay every year because we lack
such protection. And we could more than offset the cost of
building the security fence by rounding up and expelling the millions
of
illegal aliens now living in the United States. (I would extend that to
include the children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren
of illegal aliens, stripping them of their citizenship, which they
should not have been granted in the first place. Being born in the
United States to non-citizen parents should not confer US citizenship.)
There would also be ongoing costs, of course, to maintain and repair
the fences, as well as the costs involved in keeping several
divisions of border guards on duty along the border. But we can't afford not to do it.
Nor can we afford to have our military border guards arresting and
detaining people. They're not police. Their job isn't to arrest and
detain. Their job is to shoot to kill, in defense of their country.
08:35
- Netflix
is starting to throttle me again--delaying shipments,
shipping discs from far-distant distribution centers, and so
on. I returned two discs in one envelope to the Greensboro distribution
center on Saturday, 13 May. Those discs should have been logged in by
Netflix yesterday morning. They weren't. They haven't been logged in
yet this morning, either. I'm sure the postal service isn't at fault.
They invariably get discs to and from the Greensboro distribution
center in one day. It's only 25 miles from us, after all. But Netflix
won't allow me to report the discs as lost in the mail until 18 May.
That sure is an easy way for them to throttle, and it's pretty
outrageous given that they make such a big deal about offering one-day
service.
I ordered some stuff yesterday from NewEgg, including some optical
drives. I didn't order a lot of small items that I'd planned to order,
because I wasn't willing to pay NewEgg's extortionate shipping charges.
Supposedly, NewEgg consolidates shipping charges for orders with
multiple items. By playing around with my shopping cart, adding and
removing items and checking the shipping charges, I determined that
they don't actually do that.
I was going to order some floppy drives, for example. The drives cost
$6 or $7 each, but the shipping charges on them were typically $5 each.
Adding one drive to my existing order boosted the shipping charges by
$5, which it shouldn't have since I was already being charged $9.78
shipping for two optical drives. Adding a second floppy drive boosted
the shipping charges by another $5, which is simply outrageous. Adding
a third floppy drive boosted the shipping charges by yet another $5,
which defies reason. Then, to top things off, I added a small cable,
which sold for $1.99. The shipping on that cable was another $6. Sure
enough, when I added it to my cart, my shipping charge jumped by $6.
Give me a break.
The moral is that you should watch shipping charges carefully if you
order from NewEgg, particularly if you're ordering several small,
inexpensive items. I suspect they make most of their profit on shipping
charges.
Every morning, I back up our data. Being a belt-and-suspenders type of
guy, I back up our main working data directories on the server (which
happens also to be Barbara's main desktop system) to a directory on my
main desktop. I then copy the backup directory to another backup
directory on an external hard drive on still another system. That
external hard drive is 500 GB, so I can keep a couple of months'
worth of daily backups on it, with each backup set in its own
directory.
Finally, I write the backup directory from my main system to a DVD+RW
disc on a Plextor PX-716AL, and run a verify pass with K3b. That disc
goes into a wallet that sits on top of my desktop tower beside my
desk. I can easily grab it any time we leave the house. (If we'll be
gone for more than a few hours, I also disconnect the external hard
drive and take it along.)
Yesterday, as I was backing up to the Monday DVD+RW disc, it occurred
to me that it had been quite some time since I'd replaced those discs.
Although K3b had verified the disc to be error-free, I decided to run
an in-depth surface scan on the Monday backup disc with Nero CD-DVD
Speed on a Windows box with an NEC ND-3550A drive. I ran the scan at
maximum speed, which is more likely to uncover problems with the disc.
Here's what Nero CD-DVD Speed showed me.
Disc Quality results on an elderly Verbatim MKM A02 4X DVD+RW disc
Even though that disc passed the K3b verify pass with no errors (and
also passed the more superficial Nero CD-DVD Speed ScanDisc test with a
100% score) the in-depth Disc Quality scan shows this disc to have a
hideously high number of errors. The "Quality score" is 0, and that's
on a scale of 0 to 100. How can a disc that K3b and ScanDisc verified
as having no errors have so many errors? It's because K3b and ScanDisc
are only checking that the disc is readable. If the data can be read,
they consider the disc acceptable. But the Disc Quality test goes much
deeper, looking at how many error-correction retries were needed to
read the data.
So I decided to write the same data to a DVD+R disc and scan it for
comparison. Here's what Nero CD-DVD Speed showed me on the DVD+R scan.
(This scan is shorter because there was actually only 3292 MB of data
on both discs. The DVD+RW scan covered the entire disc surface because
that disc had previously been completely written to capacity; the DVD+R
scan covers only the disc surface that actually had data written to
it.) Although it might not look it, this is actually a pretty high
quality disc. A total of 44,670 PI errors looks high, but in fact it's
very low. (Note the scales on the charts. For the DVD+R scan, they top
out at 10 and 50; for the DVD+RW scan above, they top out at 200 and
2,000.)
Disc Quality results on a Verbatim MCC 003 8X DVD+R disc
I let the Plextor PX-716AL have its way with the disc, which meant it
burned this 8X disc at higher speed than it wrote the 4X DVD+RW disc.
This DVD+R disc maxed out at nearly 12X. If I'd written it at 4X fixed
speed, the number of errors would have been much lower. Instead of a
Quality score of "only" 96, the disc would probably have had a Quality
score of 99 or 100, which is typical for Verbatim MCC003 discs written
at moderate speeds in a Plextor drive. Still, a Quality score of 96 is
good enough that I wouldn't hesitate to depend on this disc.
That 96 means that the disc was readable with very little need to use
ECC to reconstruct the data during the read. It should remain readable
for a long time.
I don't use DVD+RW discs for daily backups because I begrudge the $0.25
cost of a DVD+R disc. I use DVD+RW to avoid becoming covered up in
backup discs. But I'd never run a scan on one of my DVD+RW backup discs
before, so I decided to see how a fresh DVD+RW disc compared in quality
to the well-used DVD+RW disc. I don't recall exactly when I started
using this disc set, but it's probably been a couple of years. That
means that each daily disc has been written to 100+ times. DVD+RW discs
are rated for 1,000 writes, but that doesn't necessarily mean they can
maintain high quality after even 100 writes. Here are the results of
scanning the new DVD+RW disc.
Disc Quality results on a new Verbatim MKM A02 4X DVD+RW disc
The good news is that the Disc Quality scan results are much better on
the new DVD+RW disc. The bad news is that the Quality score is still
only 30. Obviously, either written DVD+RW discs are inherently of lower readability than
DVD+R discs, or the NEC ND-3550A drive simply doesn't like
DVD+RW discs (or at least the Verbatim MKM A02 discs written in the
Plextor PX-716AL drive.) Just to be sure, I wrote and scanned several
more new DVD+RW discs, and the results were similar. I suppose if I
wanted to be rigorous, I'd replace the ND-3550A drive in the Windows
box with a Plextor and recheck the discs, or at least update the
ND-3550A firmware, which I haven't gotten around to doing.
I don't think I'll bother, though. The available evidence suggests
that DVD+R discs are more reliable, so I plan to modify my backup
methods. I'll replace the old Monday through Saturday DVD+RW discs with
new DVD+RW discs. I've never had a problem retrieving a file from a
DVD+RW backup disc, so I'll take the chance of continuing to use them
for daily backups (in addition to the multiple network volume backups I
keep.)
I'll get rid of the Sunday 1 through Sunday 5 DVD+RW discs, and begin
doing my weekly Sunday backups to DVD+R discs. That seems a reasonable
compromise. Instead of burning through 365 DVD+R discs a year, I'll use
only about 50, which can be archived onto an empty spindle as they're
replaced by the next Sunday disc.
C|Net posted an interesting article yesterday about advertisers' attempts to deal with viewers' multitasking. They just don't get it. From the article:
David Sklaver, president of KSL Media, who buys advertising time for
clients like Western Union and Bacardi, said multitasking was either "a
blessing or a curse" for advertisers. "If someone is watching a TV
drama and has CNN News on the Internet," he said, "it's most likely you
don't have an engaged viewer." But on the other hand, someone watching
a sports event on television could enhance the experience by
simultaneously surfing the Internet for game statistics.
Let me give them a clue. It's never a blessing.
If I'm watching a TV drama and have CNN News on the Internet, (a) I'll
have recorded the TV drama and either pre-zapped the commercials or
will jump through them with the 30-second advance button, and (b) I
wouldn't dream of visiting CNN.com without my ad blocker running. So
I'm not seeing any of their damned commercials anyway, and I'm not
unusual in that respect. It's true that I've been doing this longer
than most people, simply because I had a computer next to the sofa in
the den and a PVR when both of those were rare, but the fact remains
that most people who have PVRs and computers in their dens aren't going
to be seeing many commercials no matter how hard advertisers try to
force commercials down their throats. Ad-supported broadcast television
is dead. Get over it.
"Engaged" is apparently the new buzzword. What advertisers fail to
understand is that essentially no viewers are "engaged" in the sense
they define the term. People don't want to watch commercials, period.
That's what drove the revolution over the last twenty years, from VCRs
to DVD recorders to TiVo to PVRs and home media center PCs.
I've complained about Wikipedia before, but I happened across a
sentence the other night that really illustrates the all too common
problem of poor writing on Wikipedia. It comes from an article on the
Shawnee Indians.
The author of that sentence is a master of ambiguity. Does "fought with
the French" mean that the Shawnee and the French were enemies or
allies? Did the Shawnee sign the Treaty of Easton, or did the French
sign it?
09:04
-
I see that Mexico is threatening to sue the United States if the US
deploys the National Guard along our own border. That crosses the line
into the surreal.
Mexico claims that the US doesn't have the right to prevent illegal
aliens from entering the United States. Although Mexico couches its
argument in humanitarian terms, the simple truth is that Mexico treats
the United States as a dumping ground for Mexican citizens that Mexico
has neither the desire nor the ability to support. In essence,
Mexico shifts huge social welfare costs to US taxpayers by
exporting millions of unskilled people. Those costs, variously
estimated at between $30 billion and $100 billion per year, are footed
by US taxpayers.
The problem is that Mexico is exporting its losers. As Fred Reed says,
Mexican ophthalmologists aren't swimming the river. Instead, we get
Mexico's stupid ones--largely unskilled and unemployable--and no
small number of criminals.
Americans almost universally want illegal immigrants to be expelled
from the United States. I know. I've asked people what they think.
Liberals want them expelled, as do conservatives, as do
libertarians. Blacks want them expelled, as do whites. College
professors and manual laborers want them expelled. No one wants them to
remain here. No one, that is, except our elected "representatives".
The media frantically attempts to tar those of us who vocally
oppose illegal
immigration as somehow racist or anti-Mexican, which we are not. I
would happily welcome that Mexican ophthalmologist and his family. I'd
love to see them move in across the street. We need
more ophthalmologists and scientists and engineers. What we don't
need are more unskilled illegal immigrants. We have too many unskilled
citizens of our own to support as it is.
The only explanation I can think of for the federal government's
failure to clamp down on illegal immigration is that it
fears revolution in Mexico and so willingly allows illegal
immigration to continue as a sort of safety valve. If that's the real
reason that our government takes no action to prevent illegal
immigration, it's an ill-considered one. Mexico can indefinitely supply
as many illegal immigrants as the US is willing to accept. The trickle
has become a flood, and the flood an invasion. We simply cannot
continue to accept Mexico's cast-offs. We cannot afford it, either
financially or in terms of the damage it is doing to our society. It
has to stop now.
To paraphrase Jerry Pournelle, I do these silly things because I'm silly.
Yesterday morning, I was about to burn my daily backup to a new DVD+RW
disc, when I decided to try using the old disc. This time, I kept an
eye on the scan as it ran. For most of the scan, the Quality score
remained at 79. Very late in the process, a lot of errors started
cropping up, which eventually dropped the Quality score to 0, as shown
below. Interestingly, there were few errors while the scan was running
against the part of the disc I'd just written to--about 3.2 GB. It was
after that point on the disc when the errors started coming fast and
furious.
Disc Quality results on an elderly Verbatim MKM A02 4X DVD+RW disc
I thought perhaps a fresh format would improve matters, so I did a full
format on that disc, reburned the backup data to it, and ran another
scan. Here are the results of that scan. The fresh format improved
matters slightly. For most of the disc, the Quality score remained
around 80, but again dropped fast near the end of the disc, where no
actual data was written. The final Quality score ended up at 33,
significantly better than the first pass, but still not very good.
Disc Quality results on an elderly Verbatim MKM A02 4X DVD+RW disc after a full format (13.11X read)
I decided to re-run the scan with a 1X read speed. As I expected, the
results were better, although still not acceptable. The final
Quality score was 45, although once again that was reduced from about
80 by the numerous errors that occurred near the end of the disc, past
the actual data.
Disc Quality results on an elderly Verbatim MKM A02 4X DVD+RW disc after a full format (1X read)
I'm not sure what to conclude. The full format improved some of the
numbers, but others were worse. And scan of the old disc was superior
in some respects to the scan of the new disc, but inferior in others.
In practical terms, it probably doesn't matter. I have so much
redundancy in my backups that I'm unlikely to lose any data even if a
particular disc is completely unreadable. One conclusion I can make is
that DVD+R is much, much more suitable for archiving data than is
DVD+RW, as the screen shots I posted yesterday make clear. At this
point, I'm treating DVD+RW as suitable for quick and dirty short-term
backups, but nothing more.
08:33
- My den system must be schizoid by now. In the last month, it's had half a dozen Linux distros installed on it, most recently SuSE 10.1, which I installed last night. It's not over, either. Xandros Server showed up a couple of days ago, and I'll probably install it on my den system in the next couple of days.
When I started to burn the SuSE discs, I noticed that my stock of CD-R
discs was nearly depleted. I had only half a dozen Taiyo-Yuden CD-R
discs left on the spindle, and I didn't want to waste them on burning
copies of a distro that I suspected wouldn't last long on my systems.
So I borrowed some CD-Rs from a friend. She had some Memorex CD-Rs
(ugh) and some Office Depot CD-Rs (double ugh). But choosers can't be
beggars, so I soldiered on.
As it turned out, the Memorex discs were actually made by Prodisc.
Those are second-rate discs, to be charitable, which a quality scan of
the burned discs confirmed in spades. They were at least readable,
though. The Office Depot discs were actually made by Moser Baer, and
are fourth-rate discs, only one step above complete garbage. Of the
three MBI discs I burned, two had terrible quality scans (one at 12 and
the other at 0), but at least they could be read. The third disc
produced a fatal read error, so I reburned it to a Memorex disc.
SuSE 10.1 itself is quite impressive, despite a few glitches I
encountered while installing it. During installation, it offered to
test Internet connectivity by downloading the latest version of the
Release Notes. I told it to go ahead, and it failed to connect to the
Internet. (The problem was apparently temporary, because once it was
installed Firefox fired right up and connected normally.) More
seriously, SuSE 10.1 was unable to see any of the machines on our SMB
network, despite the fact that Xandros, Ubuntu/Kubuntu, and other
distros see the workgroup normally. There were also a couple of other
minor glitches. For example, although clicking the scroll wheel on my
Microsoft cordless mouse works properly, the scroll wheel doesn't allow
me to scroll.
I don't doubt that all of the minor glitches could be resolved easily,
and that SuSE 10.1 is an excellent desktop Linux. However, I'll
probably stick with Xandros and Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Speaking of Xandros,
although there's no official word about a release date for Xandros 4,
unofficially it looks like it will be July or August.
I see Mr. Bush proposes to build a few hundred more miles of fence
along the Mexican border. What an excellent idea. He could also save
money on new prisons by building only one wall instead of all four.
14:23
-
I had my first experience today with having someone else print photos
for me. I was about to amend that to "print digital photos for me", but
in fact I've never had analog photos printed for me, either. From the
first black-and-white Velox contact print I made in 1964 at age 11
through the Cibachromes, dye-transfers, and platinum prints I did
later, I've always printed my photos myself. But now I'm farming out
the job. It didn't hurt a bit.
There are any number of places that allow you to upload your images to
their server and then pick up the prints an hour later. I chose
Walgreens, not because they were the cheapest, but because they have a
store that's only a two-minute drive from our house. I uploaded the
images about noon. Unfortunately, I had to choose each image
individually to be uploaded. Walgreens apparently has a batch upload
process, but it didn't work for me, probably because it uses ActiveX or
something. Still, it didn't take long to select the images to be
uploaded, although the actual upload process took quite some time.
When the upload finished, I completed some web forms to choose the
store where I wanted to pick up the prints, indicate size and number of
prints for each image, and so on. The site is designed rationally, and
is quick and easy to use. I suppose in this day and age it's not
surprising that I had to click to accept an agreement that stated that
I owned the copyright to the images or was reproducing them with the
copyright owner's permission.
Once I filled out all the required fields, my order was processed,
giving me the option of paying by credit card then and there or paying
when I picked up the photos. I chose the latter and was informed (at
12:08 local time) that my photos would be ready for pickup by 14:08.
Not exactly the promised 1-hour service, but not bad, either. As soon
as I clicked OK to complete the order, an email arrived detailing the
transaction, listing the pickup location, and so on. About 40 minutes
later, I got another email to inform me that the photos were ready to
be picked up.
I drove over to Walgreens, where a very nice young lady helped me.
After I responded to her request for my last name, she replied,
"What an excellent name." Her name, too, is Thompson. She's proud of it
because it's her husband's name and he's serving with the US Army in
Iraq.
Being me, I couldn't resist asking her about the equipment they use to
print the images. It's a Fuji Frontier 340, which from everything I've
read is a superb piece of equipment. She said that the equipment varied
from store to store, but they were pleased to have the Frontier 340
because it was the best available.
Looking at the images, I can believe that. They're very good,
indistinguishable from a 4X6 C-print made from a color negative. I
uploaded the files in full 3008X2000 resolution, which was probably
overkill for 4X6 prints. I suspect it would be possible to print
cropped 11X14 or even 16X20 images from these files without excessive
blockiness. And at $0.19 per 4X6 print, it makes no sense at all to
print them at home.
08:53
- More mail.
From: Rod Schaffter
To: thompson
Subject: Suse 10.1; Samba and Epson 3490 scanner
Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 15:55:23 -0400
Hi Bob,
SuSE enables the firewall by
default, but it doesn't open the ports for Samba unless you tell it
to. To open the ports, go to Yast control center>Network
services>Samba server, and tick the "Open port in Firewall"
box. Alternately you can go to Security and Users>Firewall and
disable the firewall, which is what I did.
The Iscan package for the Epson
scanners in included on the non-oss add-on disk-I used the proprietary
version, but it doesn't find the scanner and install it.
After installing the package with YAST, go to
Yast>Hardware>Scanner and set up the scanner and it will Just
Work (although still not with Kooka in the last Release Candidate)
I will find out how it works with
native Linux WIFI drivers as soon as the UPS man gets here with my new
hard drive (it should have been here yesterday-3-day Select service
isn't what it used to be). I picked up another Armada M700 on
eBay for $100 for the Wife to use, which is what the drive is going
it. The Armadas run Linux very well if the latest BIOS is
installed.
Take Care,
Rod Schaffter
--
"Beneath the garments of our
civility, we are naked men. The conditions for our survival must never
be forgotten. We were not born in our clothing. Every fragment of our
comfortable world was purchased at risk, from the wilderness of nature,
and the wilderness in the heart of man. Our ancestors built and
rebuilt, all ultimately, as Nehemiah built Jerusalem wall -- sword in
one hand, trowel in the other."
--David Warren
Thanks. I'll play around with it a bit more. It seems that desktop
Linux is making great strides. There are now several distros that are
reasonable desktop choices for even novice users. As I said, I'll
probably stick with Xandros and Ubuntu/Kubuntu, simply because I'm used
to them now. I'm even getting to the point where I can tolerate
Gnome.
From: Ron Snider
To: Robert Bruce Thompson
Subject: Backup routine ...
Date: Tue, 16 May 2006 09:39:48 -0600 (11:39 EDT)
I need a backup routine at work.
I am very sloppy and inconsistent about it. I gather the essence
of your backup routine is to have a "Working Directory" that you backup
at the end of the day ... correct ? Everything is in one dir,
perhaps with sub-dirs, convenient to find at the end of the day ?
I tend to work and store the
fruits of that work in different folders, even on different drives (not
in a backup sense, but as a not-too-thought-out organization routine)
during the work day. This makes it awkward to remember what I worked on
... but eliminates the need to re-file (or eventually file ?
) the work back in those dirs and sub-dirs following a backup ...
because the work never left those dirs and sub-dirs. I assume you have
to file the contents of your previous day's "Working Directory"
the next day ... or how do you handle that aspect? Work for a
week in the "Working Directory" and then file it all on Friday ?
Thanks for any insights,
-Ron Snider-
Edmonton
Having data scattered around is a scary thought. I organize all of our
data into three directories, named usr, holding, and archive, all of
which are located on our server, which at the moment happens also to be
Barbara's main office desktop system. (The server and Barbara's desktop
system are both sancrosanct, so it made sense to combine them into one
machine).
The /usr directory contains all of our current (working) data. The
/archive directory contains old stuff that we don't access very often.
The /holding directory is a kind of intermediate holding bin between
/usr and /archive. When I'm cleaning up our working data directories, I
move files to /holding rather than directly to /archive, and then
backup /holding to optical discs. That way, /archive is changed much
less frequently and so doesn't need to be backed up as frequently (it
currently requires six DVDs to backup /archive). When /holding reaches
the size where it can't be backed up on one DVD, I sweep everything
from /holding to /archive and pull a new set of /archive DVD backups.
Those three main directories are also replicated on the hard drive of
my main office desktop, under the names /usrback, /holdingback, and
/archiveback.
The /usr directory has three subdirectories, /usr/thompson for my data,
/usr/barbara for Barbara's data, and /usr/photos for digital camera
images. Each of those subdirectories has many subdirectories, organized
functionally for Barbara's and my data and by related groups for
/usr/photos. For example, one of my subdirectories is
/usr/thompson/ora, which contains stuff I'm working on for O'Reilly.
That in turn has many subdirectories of its own. For example, one of
them is /usr/thompson/ora/btpp2e, which contains the files for the new
edition of _Building the Perfect PC_. That subdirectory in turn has its
own subdirectories, such as /usr/thompson/btpp2e/first-draft and
/usr/thompson/btpp2e/images, both of which are further subdivided by
chapter. All of our other working data is organized similarly.
One problem is programs that use hard-coded directory names for their
data or configuration files. For example, under Linux Mozilla and
Firefox store their configuration files and similar data under
/home/thompson/.mozilla, and Evolution stores its configuration files
as well as the actual mail messages under /home/thompson/.evolution.
Although it's possible to use symlinks to point applications like this
to another directory, I find it easy enough just to copy those
directories into the /usr directory structure.
So, each morning, I do the following:
1. Copy .evolution and .mozilla from my home directory.
2. Change to /usr/thompson, and delete yesterday's copies of .evolution and .mozilla
3. Paste the current copies of .evolution and .mozilla into /usr/thompson
4. Copy the directories Mail, .kde, and .mozilla from Barbara's home directory
5. Change to /usr/barbara and delete yesterday's copies of Mail, .kde, and .mozilla
6. Past the current copies of Mail, .kde, and .mozilla into /usr/barbara
7. Copy the three top-level directories in /usr
8. Change to /usrback and delete thompson, barbara, and photos
9. Paste the three top-level directories from /usr into /usrback
10. Copy the three top-level directories from /usrback
11. Change to the top-level directory of a 500 GB external hard drive that's connected to a Windows box on my desk
12. Change into the usrback directory on the external hard drive
13. Create a new subdirectory with today's data, e.g., /usrback/20060519
14. Paste the three top-level directories into that daily backup directory
15. Burn a DVD of /usrback on my machine to a DVD+RW disc (I have six
DVD+RW discs, labeled Monday through Saturday, and five more labeled
Sunday 1 through Sunday 5. I'm going to stop using DVD+RW discs for the
Sunday weekly backups and start using DVD+R discs instead.)
I know I'll get email about how easy it is to use symlinks, rsync, and
so on to streamline this whole process. Once we again have a dedicated
server, I'll certainly set up rsync, but for now this method works fine
for me.
00:00
-
00:00
-
Copyright
© 1998,
1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 by Robert Bruce
Thompson. All
Rights Reserved.
