Crashing hard drives

It happens to me without fail.

I have three computers in this house. One is a headless machine that runs Radio Userland, providing my news aggregator and this weblog, and nothing else. One is a Linux desktop machine that Windows literally refuses to run on. One is a laptop that runs primarily Linux but has Windows only because it came that way. Thus, only two usuable machines.

Whenever I take one of the machines down for heavy duty maintenence, secure in the knowlege the other one can easily pick up the slack, BAM one of the hard drives in the other machine comes crashing down, taking down both of them at once.

This has happened to me without fail the last three times that I've done something major to one of the systems. This time, I was working the desktop machine over and so my laptop hard drive failed.

Now, I've learned a little something about keeping my vital files intact when hard drives go down, so the real damage was negligible; the usual cruft you pick up in your home directory that is probably better off gone, some cookies out of my browser. Iron Lute itself suffered no damage, as I had in fact just hours before the hard drive crashed sync'ed up the workspace with another machine's hard drive.

If you haven't backed up in a while, please do so, right now. You never know when those critical files will be on a hard drive that simply refuses to work.

I've been fighting this all week and I'm finally almost in a working state now; the laptop is doing some last updating but otherwise things are in good shape.

This explains why I haven't posted anything to my Iron Lute section. Since I've actually written ahead on that, I will now post last Monday's post today, and will resume tommorow as if nothing happened. I'm also thinking of "jumping ahead" and posting on something that I'm doing right now, talking about "what is an XML tag?", but we'll see how that goes today; I'm just about to tackle that problem so I don't know that the solution I have in my head (and have had in my head for most of this week now... frustration frustration frustration) will work.

Thank you for your (aggregator software's) patience.