Following my writings on the subject of backups I had been having a few issues with my Linux system crashing. I suspected a disk problem so I ran fsck. That seemed to find lots of things that needed fixing. Unfortunately it also seemed to make one of my partitions unusable, namely /home. Luckily this was one of those I had backed up. I was able to copy all the files back from the remote server and, after a couple of false starts, now have a working system again.

My drive is one of the infamous Deathstar models from many years ago. I didn't know of that issue when I bought it. At 47GB it was a big step up from my 8GB drive. Now I can buy something five times the size for well under UKP100, so it may be time for an upgrade. I was in need of more space if I'm ever to do any video editing. Now that I have added a speedy USB2.0 card I could get an external housing for the old drive and use it for quick backups. If it actually dies then it will not be too expensive to get a new one.

My backup article prompted a post in my guestbook from the owner of Jumpstation. This fellow Linux user found me via the GeoURL system that tags web sites according to their physical location in the world.