Sorry for the lack of updates lately – both of my main computers (laptop & desktop) decided they’ve had enough of life, within 24 hours of each other.

Read the scary story including meowing hard disks, laptops breaking in half, software named after huge trees, and actual useful tips on system rescue – click on the cut!

So let’s take it one step at a time… in my desktop computer, one of the hard disks started meowing – honest! I’ve never heard such a peculiar sound coming from a hard disk before – and spinning down at random but invariably very inconvenient intervals, refusing to spin up again.

This was an old IDE hard disk, so I bought a SATA HDD and promptly ran out of SATA ports. I had to reorganize all of my data to fit on my hard disks, swap disks with my brother, etc. This is not what you want to do in your spare time, trust me.

As for my laptop, it simply broke in half. Seriously – the screen hinge just snapped, and now nothing holds up the screen. (I didn’t do anything! I was sitting and typing!) I will need to take it back for warranty replacements – it seems like a simple repair, just replace the hinge and that’s it, but warranty on my laptop still holds so I don’t want to tamper with it.

Random things which might be useful for you (they were certainly useful for me!):

* Gnome Baobab, a Linux tool which shows you how much space your stuff takes up in a nice visual way,  is extremely useful for reorganizing your data…. unless some of it is on NTFS partitions. Then its performance becomes erratic at best. (To be honest, this is a known issue and a fix is on its way.)

* System Rescue CD can save your life your sanity. Always keep a copy around. Always. Go and burn one right now. You know you want to!

* If you have more than one hard disk and more than one operating system, keep them on separate disks. If a disk decides to croak, you’ll hopefully still have a working OS… and hopefully it will be Linux and not the other way round! ;] I wouldn’t even have put this here because I thought it was common sense, but someone just expressed complete puzzlement over me organizing my data this way.

* If there is a good solution to burning Blu-ray disks under Linux which does not involve trial and error and ruining expensive media in the process, I haven’t found it yet. I haven’t ruined any disks, but I was extra cautious, and for good reason… most burners – like k3b – do not recognize the drive or the media correctly, Nero does but it also crashes often and refuses to burn at speeds over 1x.  This is a pity because I would actually have bought Nero if it functioned properly, I was so surprised to see a Linux version! (Burning works under Windows – so it’s not the drive at fault – but it’s hard to do that, having just been deprived of your Windows partition. Whoops!)

So, is there a nice utility with a nice GUI which burns you Blu-ray disks under Linux and just does what it’s told? Somehow I don’t feel like burning stuff from the command line. (I know, I know, I could make an ISO and… but… but…)

Also, I find these new spiffy 1-TB hard disks disquieting… hard disks die so often, and if one of these dies, that’s a lot of data! …so what I’m doing right now is a mix of mirroring and backing stuff up to Blu-ray. I would love to have my data just floating around in “the Cloud”, but I work with a lot of image data and video which take up a lot of space, so it’s not feasible to upload everything somewhere and download as needed. Yet.

BTW I bought this HDD (found one for a great price in a local shop) and it’s surprisingly quiet. Much more quiet than the meowing disk which it replaced… even when it wasn’t meowing!