I often preach “The most important data is backed up data!” Yet, hypocritically, I dont schedule regular backups of my own stuff.

I also often preach “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone!” And it’s true. You don’t know what important data you’ve got until you suffer a hard drive crash.

So I disassembled my laptop, chucked the drive into another box and fired up Freesbie. A couple of runs of FSCK (which is close enough to what I was saying regularly at that time) got the drive accessible. The following group of commands is what saved my bacon

mkdir /mnt/backup
mkdir /mnt/faulty
mount_msdosfs -m 777 /dev/da0s1 /mnt/backup
mount /dev/ad1s1f /mnt/faulty
cp -R -v /mnt/faulty/usr/home/rawiri /mnt/backup/backup

After checking that everything had copied across, I nuked my HDD and ran some tools on it. 1 bad sector on the /var partition was enough to bring BSD crashing down.

Well, I’ve marked that sector as unusable and reinstalled onto the drive, with my important data backed up onto DVD-RW weekly. I’m currently saving up for a new laptop, as my current one is really showing its age.

In other news, if you’re in NZ, and you have RSI, trust me – it’s almost not worth doing an ACC claim. If I were to do it all over again, I’d just pay for the private physio sessions out of my own pocket and save the stress and the paperwork. Three visits to the physio, and a visit from an occupational therapist and I’m pretty much sorted.

In other other news, I hate sausages. I’ve just had 4 weeks of tough financial circumstances, so I’ve had to buy $10 packs of sausages and get inventive. There’s only so many ways you can have sausages – devilled, stuffed, satay, stir fry but now that I’ve got some 50 hr weeks done and to be done, and a new flatmate moving in, and the end of my Hire Purchase in sight… things are looking up