commerce and needed a restyling for the entire portal. The fee we agreed on was
not huge, but I was young and I could’ve used those few hundreds of Euros. I’d
worked for that layout for two months; drafts, counter-drafts, templating studies,
curated and efficient JavaScript events and a CSS structure that even the CMS
developers would have envied. That evening, I went
to physically clean the
computer, since I believed all that dust could hurt my PC. I accurately put all
components on my desk, except the main Hard Disk that I left on the case
surface, God knows why. Without noticing it, I bent the case just a couple of
centimeters to reach a difficult point, so the HDD slided off the metal surface
and fell to the ground. It jumped only 40cm, crashing to the floor.
A utterly dead Hard Disk. I immediately connected it to the SATA and I heard
the mechanical disk spinning, although the stylus kept on ticking intermittently
for some weird reason. Nothing to do! I tried to disassemble it,
in a desperate
attempt to make it run again, without mentioning the fact that I had no idea of
how to align it on axis again – and I honestly haven’t any clue yet. A utterly dead
and buried Hard Disk.
That event was followed by a declaration of hatred against the whole world for
one hour and a half, only to drift off to desperation afterwards. It took about 2-3
hours before I recovered and started the whole work from scratch. From scratch.
From the start
I still wonder how those 40cm were enough to irreversibly damage a HDD so
massive – at least, for us mere mortals. That night I hanged out with my friends:
I took the HDD with me as a sign of mishap, to tell everyone how absurd was
that accident (maybe showing them that no scratches were
visible on the case
and so on). Encouraged by alcohol, we decided to destroy that HDD with our
hands and by any means. We used different techniques: burned with alcohol and
repeatedly hit with a shovel, dragged on the road, crushed (using the car),
exploded with firecrackers. We didn’t manage to pry it open, not even tossing it
from the car at a speed of 100km/h. If you pass by that road today, you can still
see the signal with a bent iron pole.
7.5.1 How many Backups do you need?
In order to keep everything under control, you need
at least two Backup
disks, possibly located in different areas. The first could be also left in the PC or,
maybe, used as an external HDD, while you can keep the second one in the car,
at work, at a friend/family member’s. If anything happens to one of the two
places, the other HDD will be safe.
Perform a backup when you run a new dump, when you have new logs to
work on, when you create a new bitcoin wallet. ALWAYS perform a backup for
everything you deem somehow important. Don’t take it as a fixation, of course,
but remember that the more time you will dedicate to your digital life the highest
is the loss you could suffer –
may it be money, work and whatnot.
Just think: perhaps one day you’ll have – or you already have – hundreds or
thousands of Euros in a wallet. And suddenly... puff! All gone. Who are you
going to blame? Don’t be too sparing when it comes to purchasing one or more
additional storages: if needed, split your works into multiple memories (so you
will also have a good archive, for a faster data search).
7.5.2 Rsync
Everyone have their own file organization method, therefore it would be
pointless to list the best programs for a given Operating System, telling whether
File History or Backup and Restore for Windows or Time Machine for macOS
are adequate for security copies or not.
However, we can consider the fittest tool for
this type of operations, rsync,
which is available for all UNIX-based operating systems, and for Windows
through a third-party setup with cygwin. Compared to the available counterparts,
this software offers many advantages: it’s commonly used among system
administrators, therefore it’s deeply documented, and offers a very effective file
copy algorithm, also through ssh protocol (for remote copy) as well as the
possibility to compress files on-the-fly and in different formats.
7.5.2.1 Rsync installation
Rsync is already available in macOS v10.4 and higher and,
naturally, in most
of the GNU/Linux-based distros, Debian included. If for any reason you won’t
find it installed, you can do it typing the following command from the terminal:
$ sudo apt-get install rsync
On
Windows you can refer to the Cygwin
[100]
program instead (which allows
you to install most of the tools already existing in Linux), or cwRsync
[101]
.
7.5.2.2 Local copy with Rsync
The great versatility of rsync is documented by the excellent list of the
supported parameters. You can access it launching the usual --help parameter:
$ rsync --help
or using man:
$
man rsync
Before you familiarize with its features, you should keep in mind the copy
structure. Rsync manages inputs and outputs exactly like the Linux cp tool, so it
will treat the first value as the element(s) to copy, and the second one as the
destination path:
$ rsync [filetocopy] [copydestination]
Now, let’s practice with parameters. Imagine you want to
copy a file from
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: 
