Yesterday, the system disk of "teevie", my AMD64 Linux box (which also hosts a range of other OS'es as VMware images) started running into hard disk errors.

The drive was getting terribly hot, so I took it out of the 3.5" drive slot to get some more free-air cooling. Problems went away long enough to recover all partitions with a couple of restarts (and many hours of patience). Thank you Knoppix and rsync, for being there when I needed you.

As it so happens today a big new external HD arrived (Maxtor OneTouch III), so I have been busy making full backups of all the main machines around here. No fun, but I guess I got away with the occasional when-I-think-of-it full backup style I've been doing for years now. It's not the work lost that I fear (I really do backup my active files a lot), but the amount of time it takes to restore a well-running system after serious hardware failures. Copying these big disks takes forever.

The failing IBM Deskstar 120 Gb drive worked for about 5 years without a hitch, so it really did well. Luckily, there's a spare 80 Gb around here which can take its place - but it sure takes a lot of time to shove those gigs around and get all the settings just right again!