Mini HOWTOS.

These are a bunch of things I have picked up over the years and now do routinely. they have each saved me from losing real data or stopped me trashing my system and making it non functional.

1. Take regular backups and better still automate it so you don't have to remember to do it or find the time to do it. I use BackupPC for this task

Having made the effort to take regular backups make sure that you can restore from your backups. Yes and I do mean actually restore the data.

Many years ago I saw this happen. The company concerned took regular nightly backups on their Wang system to tape. Taking the tapes off site for long term storage. One day they had a hard disk crash. The old style head crash when the head literally crashed into the platter, Scoring and removing the recording medium.
They didn't panic they thought they had good backups from last night that they could just restore to a new hard disk platter. Any way the new hard disk platter arrived and was formatted. The first tape of five was inserted into the drive and the restore began, when the tape got to the end they did not see a message that said "Insert second tape" they got a fatal error saying "End of tape reached before end of file". On contacting Wang support they were told "Oh this is a known bug. It a file spans over two tapes you cannot restore the backup past that tape!" They lost most of their data as it could not be restored. They went bust shortly after as they were an Accountancy firm who had lost their clients financial records!

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