Everything here is generally optimistic and helpful… which is excellent for community and friendship.
However, I feel we need a Bad Day thread… so here it is!
If someone posts a project in the midst of a smoke fest, let’s not try to solve the problem in this thread… there are plenty of other threads for that.
No, here, we piss and moan about our absolute shitfest of a day.
I’ll start…
A few of you already know I was over the moon when I recently purchased Ableton Live Suite 10… well, my laptop took a complete shit this morning and from what I’m seeing in command, my OS corrupted and deleted itself…
My Korg Wavestation Ex all of a sudden said: “cannot save patch”
And I wasn’t even saving one?!
Turned out that the on board battery was dead and this meant that the Wavestation had problems remembering which patches I had made over many years. Earlier that same day a PC had died, and my first thought was: “Oh well, I’ll replace it. The beast was more than 15 years old, so this was going to happen one day. No worries”. But when I read the remark on the Wavestation the world stood still for me for a few minutes as I realised that all those patches were gone. Replacing them would take much more effort.
Hard drives fail. Any hard drive, if you use it long enough, will fail. Sometimes “long enough” will be a decade, sometimes a year or two, but it’s inevitable.
If you’re not running automatic backups to an external device, you will at some point have an avoidable “bad day”.
Yeah, everybody should have backup drives, they’re really cheap and easy to use nowadays, but having backup drives is not enough, you actually have to use them regularly.
I have a calendar reminder to do a backup at the beginning of every month. Which I mostly do,
Before the pandemic I even had a friend keep an offsite copy at her place (encrypted so that she doesn’t have to worry about my private data should someone break in and steal the drive).
So at worst I lose a month’s worth of new data.
That’s not too bad, but it’s still a lot so I’d like to use an online revision control system for saving my daily progress.
It looks like a lot of people use GitHub, but that is a Microsoft product which is kinda against my religion and last time I checked, you had to pay if you didn’t want to make your repository publicly available.
Can you recommend a good, free, revision control system?
What do you guys use?
I don’t think of an RCS as a general backup system. That’s not its intended use, which is to document and maintain progressive versions of a project.
Backup systems that require the user to initiate are a poor choice. Inevitably users forget or procrastinate and end up with too long a gap between the last backup and the data loss.
On my Linux system I use Back In Time, which backs up my files every hour and saves a configurable number of hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly backups. It works invisibly (maybe too invisibly, if it stopped working it might be a long time before I noticed) and while I haven’t had a hard drive crash on this system, it’s saved my bacon many times against accidental file deletion or overwrite.
Sounds interesting, how much extra storage does it require? Double, triple what you start with? More?
Do you backup your whole system or just the users’ home directory and maybe a data drive?
It saves only changes, so any given backup is small compared to the system it’s backing up. I have it backing up my home directory. There’s actually another utility called Timeshift that backs up the system files, in a similar fashion but it’s optimized for that use and not home directories. They both back up to a 2TB USB disk. Old backups are removed as needed to free up space for new backups, currently I have both backups back to January (home directory monthlies through April, weeklies for the past four weeks, dailies for the past seven days, and hourlies for five days).
I literally lost 10 years worth of original music in Jan 2018 because both my main drive AND my backup drive crashed the same day. I tried 4 data recovery places and all said they couldn’t recover anything from either. So…my lesson was learned the hard way and I now use an online backup and recovery site. Now go get some backup drives!
I’m not aware of having to pay for a github repository at github.com
That would be odd because the site had thousands and thousands of open source repositories already when it was taken over by MS. I’m paying nobody and I have had one for years.
Still, using git remains a good idea, but that need not involve www.github.com.
What you can do is write some code and add it to git in a local repository (for that project) on your harddrive. That in itself is good for revision control. But if you want to backup the thing, you can have a remote repository (like github.com would be if you were using that) on another machine in your network and sync the local to the remote every now and then. If you like the viewing capability github has, you might want to look into gitlist. That is a viewer you can run locally with some of the functionality github provides. gitlist is just an example, there are others.
I had read a review that said that only public repository were free, but looking at Pricing · Plans for every developer · GitHub it seems that the free version does indeed offer private repositories.
Good to know.
