Mike's general stuff ~ Random
Recently it seems I've been either busy or ill :(
I found out the hard way the reason why you should back up your cherished data once in a while - and I'm going to put the blame fairly and squarely on Red Hat Linux 6.1 - and my own stupidity in trusting it not to nuke everything in sight... I have two hard disks in my PC at home, one of which I have a triple-boot setup - Win98 for games, WinNT4w for applications, and (currently) Caldera OpenLinux 2.2 to attempt to "learn Linux". This disk I couldn't care less about if it got nuked, because all my important data is on the other drive... the worst possible situation that I imagined I could end up in is if RH Linux nuked my first OS boot drive. But no, if you try a hundred times to give it the same HD resources that OpenLinux 2.2 had, and then give up and choose the 'automatic' option, which notes that it will nuke any existing *Linux* partitions, it will go away and happily nuke ALL of your partitions, on all the drives it can find. Resulting in three year's worth of data being nuked in an instant, which is bound to hurt in virtually any circumstances... the funny thing is, although I despise Microsoft operating systems for many reasons, you'd have to be pretty stupid to lose all your data by nuking partitions! They (M$ OS's) don't have any 'automatic' option regarding partition creation, and thank God for that...
I suppose the question you may ask now is "why did you want to install RH Linux (a possible first question but wait...) over Caldera OpenLinux?". Well, the reason is, that COL 2.2 (and 2.3 I believe - the latest version), has some REALLY REALLY old and outdated libraries (glibc ones being one example), which makes it virtually impossible to upgrade anything to anything up-to-date! When attempting to upgrade some of the old libraries, the dependencies begin to make you wonder things like "chicken or the egg?" I suppose a reasonable "MS OS" comparison would be having to find and update every major DLL to be able to install some piece of software :(
Data that I was really gutted about losing:
- My MP3s (lucky I had an archive of most of them elsewhere);
- My work from college a few years ago;
- Those useful applications/OS patches, savegame files;
- All those jokes sent via email;
- All those emails;
- All those email addresses;
All that porn and warez;- My Tomb Raider Last Revelation savegames (I've got back to where I was in the game now though :);
- My customised version of Quake 1 (yes, I've got it on CD, but I've lost my simpsons quake mods as well!);
- My backup copy of UFO: Enemy Unknown after the CD snapped due to a minor "incident" - now I'm going to have to buy it for FIVE WHOLE POUNDS!
- All those applications setup files :(
I've now decided (a bit late perhaps? Closing the door after the horse has bolted? No, I won't think of any other analogies...) to buy some kind of backup medium... suggestions can be emailed [here]...