[oclug] Oops... That's why my backup wasn't bigger...

[Johnathan Hicks]

Well last night I asked about how to nuke the contents of my hard drive, here 
is an interesting follow up to that. ;-)

<sad tale>
After I did badblocks -w on the drive last night it was storming so I shutdown 
and went to bed. This morning I boxed up the drive and XpressPosted it, then I 
remembered a file that wanted to look at that was on the drive. No problem I 
think, I'll just look through the filelists on the CD and find out what 
archive it's it and pull it out. One of the possible places that it could have 
been was in /usr/local/misc_texts here I've been putting interesting documents 
such as hardware data sheets, the ACPI spec sheet, the MathML spec sheet, and 
many other things I've saved there. So to start with I view filelist.full with 
less and search for that directory, but it was not to be found and was there 
fore not backed up and lost. After looking through the file I found an error 
in the file that caused everything (alphabetically) from partway through 
/usr/doc to into /usr/share not to be backed up. I can't say that I know how 
the error occured in the file. Needless to say from the swath of directories 
lost, it will be interesting trying to get the system fully operational again 
after the restore is done on the new drive.
</sad tale>

Does anyone have any creative ideas? ;-) It wouldn't be so bad if I broadband, 
but I don't unfortunately.

--John