Tim: > > Personally, I still have more faith in harddrives than SSDs for data.
home user: > Why? I'm not skeptical; this is a sincere question. > > My sense is that with a hard drive, there's a real chance of getting > advance warning (via S.M.A.R.T.) when it's near failure. It's along those lines, though both have SMART monitoring. With HDDs you tend to get omens of doom well ahead of time (small self-correcting errors with SMART warnings), SSDs seem to have sudden death issues. In the olden days, you could even hear the health of your harddrive. You got used to the noises it normally made, and abnormal ones stuck out like a sore thumb. In either case, once you put any drive in a case (pun intended), you are reliant on that enclosure supporting SMART. Some USB enclosures do not, they are a barrier to direct access to the drive needed for SMART interrogation. > I've been doing it manually. (I'm a control freak.) I need to re-think > that. I also always check the back-up (diff command). That's another aspect of automation: Backup and verification. Both can be automated. > I know I want to exclude almost all $HOME's "hidden" directories. But I > know I want to include ".thunderbird", especially calendar data. > I made the costly mistake of failing to include $HOME's hidden files. When backing up things like mail, and its settings, the mail program should not be running at the same time, at all. Same goes for other databases. You can end-up making a back-up that isn't usable. Don't just close the program's window, you have to make sure its system is completely shut down. I don't really make great use of calendar, just on Gmail (which stores on their servers) for the odd appointment in the future. I have an old fashioned diary that I really use, calendar is just a reminder. My real email is brought into a local IMAP server (Dovecot), and my local email program is Evolution. *I* wouldn't bother trying to backup Evolution's files, I consider it would be too much of a black art to try and restore them. Dovecot, on the other hand, has a far more coherent use of files for what it does. Firefox is another of those weirdly behaving programs. It has options to import data from another browser, for replacement purposes. But didn't give me any options for importing data from a prior Firefox installation. Though I can't really see anything of value in backing up *my* mail. If I'd organised to do something with someone in a day or two, and lost a message, I can just ask them again. I've got mail filed going back to around 2004, more out of habit than need. I used to have it back to about 1997, but a hard drive died, and I didn't really feel it was worth my effort to do anything to recover it. Everything else had already been shifted over to the server before that, only the old mail remained. -- uname -rsvp Linux 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Tue Jun 4 14:43:51 UTC 2024 x86_64 (yes, this is the output from uname for this PC when I posted) Boilerplate: All unexpected mail to my mailbox is automatically deleted. I will only get to see the messages that are posted to the mailing list. -- _______________________________________________ users mailing list -- users@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to users-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/users@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
