LinuxBBQ

So, I feel like a complete idiot at the moment. I just finished installing Slackware 14.1 on my Thinkpad, but instead of putting it on /dev/sda4 (as I intended to do) I idiotically had it installed to /dev/sda3, which is (was?) my BBQ partition. It took me a bit to realize this, as I was in my Win7 partition recording my ALSA challenge and doing general browsing for school. I dug around through Reddit looking for a solution, and I did install TestDisk but wasn't able to find anything with it. To top it all off, I did the full Slackware install (~7GB worth?), so I am hoping I haven't overwritten my /home partition yet. There is no great emergency here, although I do happen to have all of my music and configs missing. I can use my Fedora 21 + FF for most of my immediate needs.

Any ideas? Is there hope for recovery? Thanks, and boy do I feel like an idiot.

tl;dr Make backups, kids. I should have.

yeah, the three B's of computing - backup, backup and backup.
You won't find much if overwritten.

(you're a reddit fan, look up Tales From Tech Support.)

wuxmedia wrote:yeah, the three B's of computing - backup, backup and backup.
You won't find much if overwritten.

That is what I feared. The files were not completely necessary anyway; it can all be replaced. I didn't pay for any of the music anyway, so that wasn't too big of a big loss :D

wuxmedia wrote:(you're a reddit fan, look up Tales From Tech Support.)

Whoa! Sweet, I have no clue how I haven't seen that sub before! I am subscribed to a couple other "Tales From" subreddits, such as

/r/talesfromcallcenters
/r/TalesFromTheSquadCar
/r/TalesFromYourServer (note that this is not the type of server that we know and love here at the bbq)
/r/TalesFromThePizzaGuy (where the OP always delivers)
/r/talesfromsecurity <--- I have always thought it would be funny to do a post about something related to IT-security or dealing with an angry customer asking why iptables isn't working properly after they "changed a couple of things in it".

They all have fantastic content, much funnier than /r/funny ever could be!

^ heh. reddit is rightly eeeeeenormous. I have yet to make any posts in that TFTS sub. :)

have suggested it to other co-worker redditors - "too close to the day job to be funny" was the general feeling. :)

https://www.code42.com/crashplan/

or rsync :)

^ pretty website :)
the local backup we run at work is a life saver, especially when I'm let loose making apache vhosts and somehow symlink five files to the one file I was duplicating, thereby erasing it and having five no good symlinks.
it basically rsyncs the / to another disk.

Backup like a crazy dude, only thing I can say. I usually backup some directories (documents/music) once a week and keep config files on github because I know this poor old lappy can't last forever.

@MB Jeez, rsync is something I should have been using ages ago. As I look through the man page, it looks like a simple but powerful little tool.

@GekkoP I have learned my lesson, unfortunately :) I went down to the chalice of American beauty (Wal-Mart) this morning and picked up a 64GB flashdrive to start backing up all of my junk in the future. It will be nice to rebuild my Music library with exactly what I want, though. Sort of like a new start :D

A bit on topic:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/fu ... g_a_script
http://www.bobulous.org.uk/misc/rsync-backup.html

There are quite many. Usually, I wouldn't bother syncing the /usr and /lib folders, or /var and /tmp, but really just the /home/$USER folder and, if applicable, the /home/$PORN folder. Configuration files and nude selfies should also go to github ;)

@Dr: that's the spirit :)

Pro tip: Always keep a separate data/media partition that will be shared across multiple OS's :)

^ That's OK but still not failsafe. Imagine you have a Western Digital hard disk as data/media partition, and the fucker breaks (happened to me twice !!), you lose all the carefully downloaded porn. So, back this shit up, too. Seriously. :)

^ agreed, need an 'offsite' backup. It is also possible to dd to sda; not that I've ever done that ... cough,cough.

Anyway, can also say having a /data partititon is definite.

machinebacon wrote:Imagine you have a Western Digital hard disk as data/media partition, and the fucker breaks (happened to me twice !!), you lose all the carefully downloaded porn. So, back this shit up, too. Seriously. :)

On a side note:
Always the Seagates that fuck up at the DC, not that we get through google quantities of HDD's, but the WD's (blacks greens and reds) have been good to us so far.

Magic truth: check the country of manufacturing. Those that died on me were all made in Malaysia. The old IDE disks that I brought with me from 'home' (already in heavy us before 2006!) still work fine.

A few years ago "Luc" helped me get a bash script working using rsync to back up my $HOME to an External HDD: and my "/media/5" partition, all MY stuff, doc files, music, videos, etc to the HDD: /M5

Currently I have:
/media/disk/M5
/media/disk/S11-Dec
/media/disk/S11-Jan
/media/disk/S11-Nov
/media/disk/S11-Oct

Once the initial monthly backup is done it takes just a few minutes every couple of days to do a backup.

IF anyone is interested I can pop it up here.

^ always interested - maybe a new thread?

wuxmedia wrote:^ always interested - maybe a new thread?

OK, I put it here. Hope it in the right place