Backups are worth it
Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 07:18pm
Just before I went to OSDC I moved the contents of my Inbox to a new folder so during the conference I only had to worry about anything new that had come in. My first attempt at applying the concept I have seen referred to as ‘process to empty’.
This worked well and I ended up using it as a place to store anything that came in during the conference that I wanted to deal with when I returned home. Which I did.
However, once I had dealt with all of the recent items I accidentally deleted the folder. This meant that a couple of emails that had been hanging around in my Inbox for a long time were gone. And I still needed them.
Six months ago I had burnt a backup of my photos and documents that I was storing off-site (aka at work) so today it was a simple matter of grabbing the appropriate disc, extracting the archive of my home directory, and picking out my Inbox from that. Then when I got home it was a matter of dumping the files in the appropriate directory (under Maildir) and looking at the messages in Thunderbird.
Now, the data that I lost wasn’t particularly important, but I do need it in order to follow some things up so I was thankful.
Something I need to improve is the interval. The off-site backup is 6 months old. While my other backup is a nightly rsync that gives up to 24 hours. I have been meaning to use an external hard drive which could give a number of week intervals.
