The day before yesterday it happened… The unthinkable… The unbearable… My backup disk died!! :(

Of course the warranty for my Western Digital MyBook (it's actually a Caviar 2500 inside) expired half a year ago. Exactly on the 8th of August 2008 – the same day that the XXIX. Summer Olympic games in Beijing started.

The problem is most probably a faulty controller, so if anyone out there has a Western Digital Caviar SE WD2500JB with intact electronics that (s)he's willing to give me, it'd make me very happy!!

What makes it even odder is that the backup disk died, while the half year older Fujitsu HDD that I back up onto that WD MyBook is still alive knocks on wood

Needless to say, Murphy strikes with perfect timing, when I was just deciding which backup tool to use next (and trying to write an ebuild for it)! Initially I used KDar, then KBackup and later switched to RDiff-based Keep. I grew quite enthusiastic about RSync'ing backups, but had to chose an applications that would not tie me to the old KDE3 libraries (none of the above have a KDE4 port yet).

My current contenders are (or rather were before my backup disk died):

  • the very advanced Qt4-based LuckyBackup
  • the easy to use Back in Time that has KDE4 and GNOME GUI
  • and lastly, a new kid to the block, Mabumbi – a simple KDE4 backup utility that's specialised for use with external/USB disks as backup device

…there's even a thread on the KDE forums that talks about all three.

But this incident made me realise that your backups are only as strong as the medium you use. So, I'm actually considering an online backup service. I've just started looking, but so far SpiderOak looks pretty good. Especially their security and privacy looks right (and the fact that they support FOSS). I'm still new to this idea, but I feel kind of vulnerable without backups, so I'll be looking into it a bit more.

But it's not all about backups – because my laptop is only 60 GiB small, I have (had) all my music on the external disk. You'd expect me to be mad as a bat right now because of that, but now I'm getting my fix directly from Jamendo, Magnatune, Last.fm and (other) streaming stations like ShoutCast and Soma.fm (and good ol' FM radio on my iRiver). I can barely wait for Amarok2 to be usable on AMD64 in Gentoo to make better use of such services! :D

hook out → sitting on the balcony, watching the sun set, blogging and sipping Taylors of Harrogate Mango (black) tea


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