Flashes of Panic

I’m sitting at my desk restoring files from a backup.

It’s a nearly-two-month-old backup, made before I went to China, but the fact is that late last week my laptop burped in such a way that I was unable to log on as myself. (I’m not an admin user on my own laptop, for security reasons.) I was able to log in as an admin user and see all my files, but logging in as myself produced an interesting situation: the login application itself crashed and I was returned to the login screen.

So after fighting with that for a while, I gave up and reinstalled the operating system. Doing so preserved all my files, passwords, and software. Well, most of my software; for some reason I lost the entire /usr/local/ branch of the file tree, which meant I lost a lot of unix-y development stuff, like source code management (svn), Ruby, Rails, and MySQL (data and all).

My backups are old, sure. But they’re better than trying to reconstruct all this stuff from scratch. I’m actually sort of pleased, because this is the first time I’ve had to restore files from this backup and it’s nice to know it actually works. The biggest problem is that setting up the restores seems to take forever.

And I need to make a fresh backup one of these days when things are closer to normal.

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