[scribus] Drat !!

[jwminer at accessvt.com]

John C. wrote:

> I have two hard drives, and use a surge protector. The
> newest/biggest hard drive is for work and the older/smaller one is
> for experiments with different distributions and more pertinently
> for my two backup partitions.  Overnight my work files (/usr/local
> and /home ) are backed up to partitions on drive number 2.
>
> About every three years I buy a still newer and bigger drive. The
> oldest drive is retired, the remaining drive is demoted to backup
> duty and the newest is now the daily work drive.  I buy hardware
> from Tiger Direct.
>
> I have a mid-tower computer and I run Linux primarily.  With a
> laptop and/or MSWin things get more complicated.
>
> I only lose files through gross stupidity.  No hard drive failures
> since I went on a three-year rotation.  Hardware is cheap, data is
> (or are) expensive.

This sounds like an excellent plan. I feel compelled to point out,
however, that ANY drive can fail at ANY time without warning. And
that means exactly what it says. A 2-day-old drive can fail (early
death). A 1-year-old drive can fail. And of course, the older a
drive is the more likely it is to fail, although I'm sure there are
10-year-old drives that are still going strong (though so slow and
small that I wonder why anyone would use one).

We all need to keep this in mind and be sure that anything we'd hate
to lose is backed up at least to the point that we wouldn't jump off
a cliff if we lost the work we'd done since our last backup.
Sometimes this may mean copying to a flash drive or another physical
drive in the system as we work.

I also suggest using an uninterruptible power supply instead of a
surge protector. UPSes are now much less expensive than they used to
be. If you lose power, a UPS will keep your computer going until you
can do an orderly shutdown. This is a further protection from
corrupted files. Also, many UPSes condition power and protect from
sags as well as spikes. Fluctuating power can be damaging to
computers. If you're generally around when power might fail, you
don't need a UPS with as much runtime off the battery as you'd get
with a more expensive unit.

Most UPSes have outlets for both battery-protected and just
surge-protected power. You'd plug things that must be running
(computer and monitor) into the battery-protected outlets and
noncritical stuff (e.g., speakers, inkjet printer) into the other
outlets. I don't plug laser printers into a UPS that's also
protecting a computer because laser printers (mine, anyway) demand a
lot of power when they're working and sometimes when they're not and
you don't want to drain the UPS battery unnecessarily.

May we all never lose data!
--Judy Miner
  Vermont, USA

Registered Linux User #397786