Dead But Not Buried
Aug 9th, 2007 by Don Ray
Yesterday my Linux PC started dying. It started out by running for a period of time and then shutting down. It is now to the point that it won’t power up. It is over five years old, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.
I have moved all operation over to the Mac Mini until I get and accurate diagnosis of the problem. I had recently backed up all files to the External drive I had purchased in the US.
I had been researching how to export my email address file for backup, but unfortunately, I had not completed that process before this unexpected failure occurred.
I had a few tasks I was researching for some readers that had written me and now, I am with out their email addresses.
If you have written me, with a question or a request, please send me another email. Isn’t technology wonderful!
Let this failure be a warning to all of you that may have important information on your PC that you don’t want to lose. In this new age, where all of our photos are digital and possibly stored on a PC, you can lose memories in a heartbeat.
Don Ray,
Here’s hoping your problem isn’t the hard drive. Your experience certainly is unlike any I’ve had. Since it doesn’t power up, I suspect the PSU, but diagnosis from thousands of miles away is far from art or science.
I’m still trying to sort out the best (reliable, doesn’t depend on an action by me) backup method. Any suggestions you may have (has to run in Linux) would be appreciated.
I don’t think it is the hard drive. I think it is 1) PSU, 2) motherboard, or 3) cpu or cpu fan.
I also looking for the best way to backup the system. My quich and dirty just backed up all of mt working files, but not the system files. I know it isn’t the way to go, but I am glad I backed up what I did back up.
When you get an opportunity (if you haven’t already) create a separate partition to mount as /home. As long as that partition is intact, you won’t loose much when you update or do a fresh install. Sometimes updates (to next version) don’t work as planned and I’ve had to do fresh installs.
If you have a separate hard drive, you can do a hard drive backup using rsync and cron. For example, I can (but not really doing it) have a line in my root crontab which will perform “rsync -av /etc /backup/etc” to backup the configuration files in /etc and “rsync -av/home /backup/home” to backup the /home files. Look at “man rsync” and “man cron” for more information.
There probably are some GUI backup front ends, but I’ve not spend enough time with them.