My wife (whom I volunteered as a guinea-pig user of Ubuntu 8.04) suffered a hard disk failure last year. Fortunately there were early warning signs and I was able to back up the whole disk on to another network machine before her system went belly-up.
A new disk was in transit when her system failed and for a couple of days she was able to keep going by using a partially-restored home directory on my laptop. One minor complication was that she had been using 10.10 with Gnome 2, whereas the laptop was 11.10 with Unity. However, all affected applications cheerfully sorted themselves out - much to my relief. When the new disk arrived, I was able to get her fully operational again on her own machine with a clean install of 11.10 - including updating from the temporary laptop account, and securing her confidential data in a dynamic ecryptfs partition - within a day. The only programs I invoked were bash, tar, scp and sshfs. Things would not have been so simple under M$. (I remember about three days' downtime when a similar thing happened to my Windows* box a few years ago.) Let alone with a serious OS upgrade at the same time. If you're planning to have a hard disk go down any time soon, my advice would be to get the right OS first! Regards to all, CPKS * "Windows" is a registered trade mark of Microsoft Corporation. -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday 2012-03-06 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:[email protected] How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
