I was happily working on my Kubuntu box when the hard disk light went solid. I shut down all the running apps and the disk light stayed on, so I dutifully rebooted only to be greeted with a Hard Disk Not Found message from the BIOS.

I have a great backup scheme where I backup to the RAID array on my server which gets backed up weekly to tape. My automated backups stopped working 4 months ago after a system rebuild (yes I know). So I really need to get my data back.

I purchased an external USB enclosure for the dead disk, having had success with these before where a system BIOS couldn't see a drive but the limited electronics in an external USB could. Under Linux the USB came up as a device, so I duplicated it using ddrescue onto a brand new disk and then used gpart (not gparted) to rebuild the partition table. The whole process took about 6 hours and I got every single file back. I love Linux.

Having learnt my lesson I did some research into various backup options and chose to use rsync to backup all my laptops and desktops to my servers RAID array and then rsync that data to an external 500GB drive. I use native rsync on my Linux boxes and DeltaCopy on my Windows machines. Not a perfect solution but a fast and automated system - a backup of 200GB of data runs in under a minute by only copying the file differences via rsync.

Labels: Linux