On 8/23/2025 8:59 PM, Tim wrote:
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.
Thank-you, Tim.
Is the last paragraph above a major reason S.M.A.R.T cannot check USB
sticks?
The f3 suite can check capacity only, but not non-destructively -
useless once something has been written to the stick that I don't want
to lose.
Is there a way to check a stick non-destructively?
(snip)
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.
I use imap, messages are not stored locally.
I check for and delete messages I'm really done with, empty the trash
folder, empty the spam folder, clear out filter logs, exit Thunderbird,
log off, log back in, and proceed with back-up. I use the Lightning
calendar packaged with Thunderbird, but it's not on-line. I need it
backed-up.
(snip)
Thank-you.
--
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