[Wylug-discuss] Delurk and how not to use rsyncApa

[james riley]

Okay, I've actually not been lurking on discuss, but one one or two of
the other wylug lists. Got a reasonable anecdote, and possibly a
warning for others who might make the mistake I just made.

They say there's 2 types of people. Those who back up religiously, and
those who have never suffered catastrophic data loss. I just
discovered the 3rd type. Catastrophic data loss while setting up a
backup. I have my desktop and the netbook, both running Ubuntu 11.04,
but classic, not unity. I have been synching them with usb memory
sticks for a long time, I was about to write a script to synch them
over the network, before I was told about rsync.

Both machines have an encrypted /home partition. I made the mistake of
trying to copy /home rather /home/james. Fortunately, most of my
documents are up to date on the non-broken box, except the netbook
doesn't have space for the many videos on the desktop. Though this
does mean that I can finally run gparted on the desktop to make /home
bigger without worrying about losing the data on it. Because the data
are already gone.

Apart from that, I'm a 6th year maths student at the Uni of Leeds.
Lived in W Yorks all my life, tried gnu/linux in 2006 for the first
time, then gave up on it a few times, and moved to it alone some point
between then and now. Mostly Ubuntu. I try to avoid the holy wars.
Been meaning to come to one of the WYLUG socials, but they either
conflict with scifi-soc socials, or I get anxious about meeting new
people.

James