All - Leonid Mamchenkov

Test your backups!

You can read all the books in the world and know all there is to know, but if you don’t follow the wisdom and practice the knowledge, then it’s all useless. That’s my lesson from yesterday.

The Tao of Backup, which I linked to before, says:

So, what happened? Well, as I was preparing for the Fedora 24 installation, I wanted to backup some of my files, as the partition would be formatted. I’ve connected an external USB drive with plenty of space and ZIP-archived a few of the vital directories on to it.

That was a very simple backup procedure and I saw the resulting files on the volume. What else should I do, right? Wrong! I should have tested the restore. I didn’t.

Most of the directories that I backed up were small – /etc, /opt, /root. But my /home directory was about 20 GBs. The external USB disk used the FAT-32 file system, which has a 4 GB file size limit. So only the first 4 GBs of my /home folder were backed up. Funny enough, those files were mostly browser cache and image thumbnails – stuff that should be ignored from backups. The main two folders that I wanted – Desktop and .ssh were not part of the backup. And I only realized that after the partition has been formatted.

So, yeah, I should have tested the backup.

P.S.: Gladly, I do have backups elsewhere, and most of my work is committed to GitHub/BitBucket anyways.

Fedora 24 : the day of 64-bit has come

I’ve been using 64-bit Linux distributions on the servers for a while now, but was reluctant to put one on my laptop. I’ve tried a couple of times many years ago, and found that there were all sorts of weird issues.

Yesterday, with a little push from my brother, Google, and Slashdot, I’ve decided to give it another go. 64-bit Fedora 24 is now on my laptop and I am carefully exploring it. So far, so good.

I guess I won’t have to worry about Year 2038 Problem after all.

Election. Yeah, right!

This Google blog post titled “A voice for everyone in 2016” made me chuckle:

Every election matters and every vote counts. The American democracy relies on everyone’s participation in the political process. This November, Americans all across the country will line up at the polls to cast their ballots for the President of the United States.

It sounds like a true effort to make things better and enhance democracy and what not. But in practice, is it really an election? One by one, the candidates are falling of the ballot. Day by day it becomes more obvious that Hillary Clinton will be the next president of the USA.

The more tools and technologies we have to enhance our lives, the worst the content on which we can apply those tools becomes. The better the home cinemas became, the worse the movies got. The better audio systems we have, the worse the music gets. And politics just follow the same trend, unfortunately.

Emails, WordPress, and lots of Archives

I’ve been running this blog for a very long time now. The Archives page links back to all the months and years (all the way to the first post back on October 21, 2001) of all kinds of posts – random rants, movie reviews, technical posts, and day summaries. But who does read the archives ever, right?

Well, if you are running a WordPress site with lots of content, and you want to rediscover some of your old gems, there is an excellent plugin that helps with that – “This Day in History“. I have a widget, powered by that very plugin, both on the front page of the site (showing posts from the same day in previous years), and on every post page (showing posts from the same day of the post in different years).

Today I found this short post about email and Microsoft Outlook:

There was a time, when I used to love email. I loved receiving email, and reading it. Replying to email. Or just writing up some new email. Occasionally, forward email. I loved searching through email. Or categorizing it. Or archiving email. I loved quoting email. And I loved email with attachments. But now, I pretty much hate all of that. Thank you, MS Outlook.

Which made me think of the IT Crowd TV series, the very first episode of the very first season, where Jen was going through the interview:

I’ve always been a big fan of IT Crowd, in particular for its accurate take on the corporate culture. Obviously, I thought of myself more like the Roy character, not Jen:

Given that the post was written in 2012, and this episode came out in 2006, I was probably mocking it, but I don’t remember for sure. Anyways, it’s fun.

Oh, and by the way, if you were wondering what’s a better email client, here is the post just for you.