Entry1

[ironicbadger]

I've been using linux since I was 11 years old and have been collecting music, movies, and books since then. I had written journals and poetry, I hosted a photo gallery for family and friends, diy movies, a mail server, etc. All the systems I built were from hand-me-down hardware, or hardware I scavenged from dumpstering electronic recycling centers and apartment complexes. Sufficed it to say I was a kid with little money and and lots of resourcefulness, so my machines were always frankenstein setups composed mostly of all scavenged hardware. With all these setups I got to learn a lot about hardware and linux. My first distro was Slackware, then took on building Gentoo, learned a lot. Eventually got lazy and used debian. Now at a comfortable inbetween with Manjaro and Nix.

Regardless, through my whole life of learning and hacking, collecting and creating data, building machines filled with irreplaceable data, I have never had a good backup or duplication plan. I got good at partitioning drives, migrating root folders to new distros, moving my numerous media and home partitions from one disk or filesystem to the next as I religiously listened for any whispers of the clicking death of a drive. This was dangerous, but quite affordable ;-) and, being quite cheap, I couldn't argue that. And, miraculously, I never had a problem with this setup.

Fast forward, I hit my 20's and I decide to start hitch hiking, riding freight trains, and living out of a backpack in various wilderness areas. Started using cantennas to steal public wifi from long distances. I would still host media servers from my devices whenever/wherever possible. This whole time, I'm still rolling with the terrabytes of personal/project data since I was 11 mind you. And at that time even just one terrabyte was A LOT! As I traveled, I could enjoy digital memories, movies and music too obscure to exist anywhere else than with me on my drives. I eventually saved up and bought a set of binaural microphones. With these I started to collected audio of impromptu folk music sessions in train yards or mountain meadows or desert caves. I recorded campfire conversations among old friends. I started recording the sounds of certain environments, as a sort of audio journal. All the data kept building. 11 years old, now 25. And still no backup.

But of course, the tower fell; the shoe dropped; the bell tolled; and the data archive of a young person coming-of-age was gone. There was no sign, no forewarning -- just endless I/O errors and a big fat failed fsck! I'm sure it was the shock of jumping in and out of box cars, or sleeping out in freezing weather. Go figure.

So alas, having an on-site backup in my life now, would change my world. Though I'm beginning to get with it by starting to use Nix. No worries if someone else deserves the drive more. Someday I'm sure I will find a good drive to shuck and get my act together.