| Real pros never talk about their screwups, but I find them endlessly fascinating myself... |
| Despite my backups (to a SCSI DAT drive), I actually managed to lose some of my stuff in a disk crash: I had a directory called "Images" which was originally just a catch-all for stuff off the web I felt like saving, but it had gradually mutated into a place where some original work was being done (e.g. collages based on those images) and yet I neglected to add it to my list of backup locations. |
| Now, this wouldn't have mattered quite so much if I was running a seperate desktop and webserver, but that was during a period when my webserver had died, and my workstation was doubling as a webserver. I often succumbed to the temptation to "publish" things to my web site using symlinks, which did not make it any easier to keep track of the really important locations. |
| Obviously, if I'd been religiously doing incremental backups of my entire workstation, this problem would've been covered, but for better or for worse, I was mostly doing "quick" backups of the hot locations I cared about the most. If that seems cheesy, consider that backups you actually do are always going to be better than the ones that you meant to do -- there's something to be said for making your home backups quick and painless. And really, I lost a very small percentage of my original material: almost all of it was covered. |
| Anyway, I think this was an interesting gotcha. If you rely on a listing of which locations are "hot", then that listing is pretty hot too, and you'd better be keeping it up to date. |