We Actually Love Backups

So, I come to my computer this evening to do some work, and after about 10 minutes of listening to music and sorting things out, my computer freezes for a couple of seconds, accompanied by a loud clicking noise from the hard drive. Erk, I think to myself. I guess this hard drive is failing.

The fact that it's my seventh this year (yes, 7th) is actually a good thing, because with each failure I learn a new lesson, and it is always that I'm really going to miss the thing I just lost. After losing most of my e-mails and work and music over the years, I've got all of these on servers that are backed up using the fantastic Unison, which leads me to the lesson for today: I need to write a script to back up my saved games.

Unlike previous hard drive failures where I have frantically scrambled around my drives hunting for crucial files, unable to read the screen through my floods of tears, today I spent a few comparatively calm minutes copying over my saved games for Hitman and Half-Life 2. Tomorrow I will go to PC World and get a new hard drive, spend a couple of hours installing the OS and applications, and I'll be on track to meet this weeks deadlines.

Backups kick ass! </smug>

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