whrrr… click! the death gurgle of a hard drive expiring. My main PC 150Gb Western Digital failed taking with it just about everything. All my code, Open University dissertation work, decades of emails.

Not pleasant at all, and once a hard drive has had a head crash it’s all but unfixable. A data recovery service can (for a fee) take the drive apart in clean room conditions and try to get those magnetic dots off the platers, but it’s still costly and uncertain. So, use another machine to order a new hard drive from dabs on the Thursday evening which arrived Saturday lunchtime. I don’t often need to buy drives and every-time I do I’m shocked by how prices fall and capacity rises. A new 500Gb for £38 is slightly bonkers considering it wasn’t so long ago £100 got a much smaller disk.

Installed and booted up a CDROM of Ubuntu 9.04, then followed the upgrade path to Ubuntu 10.04. Admittedly it takes a while to do the process since it’s a lot of data to pull down over the broadband but it’s very, very easy. A few quick questions and it just works. I like to use the expert option to partition my disk, but even that’s a menu driven doddle. With a now happy and working machine it’s the moment of truth, will the backups restore? My backup strategy involves a cron that creates a tar of /etc and /home. /etc holds the machines configuration in nice text files and /home is where all my own stuff is. Those tar files are then copied to another machine. Restoring involves copying the tar file back and unpacking the contents and ….. yes! no problems. No work lost at all. Phew! Actually I don’t use the /etc backup preferring to use it as a reference to edit the fresh machine’s /etc.

But what could have been a catastrophe was just a frustrating weekend. The new install of Ubuntu has a few ugly bits such as an awful login screen, failing to run my monitor at the correct resolution and a badly unconfigurable indicator-applet but nothing major. So don’t delay, do backups TODAY!!