Digital Boxes

I started the day about 0915 today, went on the ‘country run’ to let the dogs out. Came home, had a fast breakfast and started my backups. Went to work till after 1600. The usual crap after RTB (Return To Base), set up SAL1600 to share a folder on the workgroup. Before my laptop could see the SMB Share I had to reboot the (windows) box hosting the share.

I’ve finished backing stuff up and got it all moved onto SAL1600. So my darling Dixie is ready to have her hard drives wiped clean for upgrade.

 Terry@Dixie$ du -ch ./*                                                   22:28
4.6M ./Documents.tar.gz
1.8G ./Music.tar.gz
308M ./Pictures.tar.gz
33M ./Programming.tar.gz
422M ./Videos.tar.gz
36M ./dotfiles.tar.gz
288K ./lastminute.tar.gz
2.0K ./loader.conf
928K ./misc_files.tar.gz
8.9M ./root-compat-linux-opt-navigator.tar.gz
304K ./root-etc.tar.gz
1.7M ./root-usr-Projects.tar.gz
1.3M ./root-usr-local-etc.tar.gz
42K ./root-usr-local-share-uemacs.tar.gz
10M ./root-usr-local-share-vim.tar.gz
14K ./sh.tar.gz
2.6G total
Terry@Dixie$ 22:28

Backed up my Documents, my Music collection, my Pictures, my Programming directory, my Videos, my shell script/binary directory, the .dot files I want to keep and a few files sitting around my home directory. Also /usr/Projects where I have files for PBI Making stored, my loader.conf and a few things from the file system. the two major etc directories and my files for Vim and MicroEMACS, even Netscape Navigator 9, so I won’t have to re download it.

When I started out my home directory was about 3.4GB according to du(1) and its -h switch. Now all the files I have archived are just over two and half GB. Its a strange feeling to see a major part of my life packed up into ‘digital boxes’…

Since I’ll be reformating for PC-BSD v1.4-Release I’m not going to keep most of the KDE or QT related files, just the ones I don’t care to replace (konsole schemas, Konversation settings) and things for Amarok and Kopete that I can have on record if I need to ‘restore’ them.

For backing stuff up I really do prefer to use dump & restore for major stuff, I can get the system live and mount the disks. Then start a dump and feed in through a Secure Shell login to the server where it’ll be compressed. Since a level 0 dump is pretty big for me, I tend to use bzip for compression. But for this job, since its just the files I’m interested in I’ve used a bunch of TAR Archives and gzip’d them. That way I can unpack them at my leazsure when the system is finally operational, Just waiting on PC-BSD to release v1.4, in the mean time I want to work on my partitioning scheme. I may also try to install a very minimal OpenBSD 4.1 into a partition. Reason? Get it set up so I can boot into OpenBSD, mount the PC-BSD slice and dump it over the network with less hassle ^_^

*sigh* time to leave for work again….1841 local, at least it’s a very short run.