lists.infradead.org mailing list memberships reminder

[MacFH - C E Macfarlane - News]

Please see below ...

On 01/07/2020 12:31, David Woodhouse wrote:
> On Wed, 2020-07-01 at 12:12 +0100, MacFH - C E Macfarlane wrote:
>> Jeez, "a couple of years ago"???!!!   Don't they make backups more often
>> than that???!!!
> No, I didn't.
>
> Annoyingly, I did have a friend who'd been staying with us during
> lockdown — he was here "for a few weeks while his house purchase went
> through" when it hit — who had purchased a new backup server of his own
> and was mocking me into compliance when I admitted I didn't have proper
> backups.
>
> I had *almost* got round to buying a shiny new machine of my own when
> the RAID failed in the machine that was lists.infradead.org, and I
> realised that the crappy Dell hardware RAID controller had *already*
> dropped a disk for some reason without me realising, so it was now
> completely gone.
>
> So the last "backup" is from when the lists were last hosted on a
> different machine of mine, before it was all moved over to the now-dead
> one. And is from May 2018.

I'm sorry if I sounded rather exasperated, because a month or two back I 
spent a couple of days changing all my newsgroup, software, and similar 
email lists to go to my news account, so that I could reinstitute my 
signatures on my personal account now that I'm using a client that will 
let me set up separate signatures for different accounts, and, not 
realising this was the only subscription of mine to lists.infradead.org, 
I had visions of having to do much of that work again.

I didn't realise that you were running all this yourself from your own 
home or office, and I don't know how much it all costs you personally, 
so I hesitate to recommend anything, but I have three laptops all of 
which have separate system and data partitions, and every evening before 
signing out of any that I've been working on that day I backup all 
changes on the data partition to a NAS, and this in turn backs up to the 
older one it replaced overnight. Periodically I also take an image of 
the operating system partition, which is saved on the data partition, so 
this, too, will get backed up to the NASs the evening after it is made.  
The new NAS is a QNAP TS-251+ with BIG disks, the old one a Zyxel NSA221 
with smaller disks, and the arrangement seems to work very well for me, 
though there will eventually come a time when the new NAS will be too 
full to be backed up to the smaller drives of the old NAS, and then I 
will have to think again.  Meanwhile, there are things I could delete to 
delay that crisis.

>> Doubtless that's why this has all come to the wrong email address again,
>> and presumably I'll have to change them all again :-(
> Yes. Apologies for that.
>
> It's backed up now.... not that that helps.
>
> Maybe after next time I'll start *verifying* my backups too.

I've fixed the address again now, anyway, but thanks for the explanation.