Checked the health of your SSD or HDD recently?

beachboy2 · 07-03-2020, 03:30 AM

One way to test the health of your drives is to use GSmartControl:

Code:

sudo apt install gsmartcontrol

https://gsmartcontrol.sourceforge.io/home/

Short and extended self-tests are available, with the output either being viewed or saved.

Unfortunately, even SSDs with a clean bill of health can fail suddenly without warning.

Why SSDs die a sudden death:
https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2019/01/w...-deal-with-it/

It is essential to prepare for such an eventuality by having all personal data etc backed up.

However, even that may not be enough to fully restore the personal data, depending on the particular software employed and the type of backup used, as can be seen here:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...failure-38296/

obobskivich · 07-03-2020, 07:49 AM

Your second link is truncated - its embedding the '...' into the linked URL and resolves to a 404.

The full link (for anyone interested) is here: https://blog.elcomsoft.com/2019/01/w...-deal-with-it/ (I found this from your LQ article)

Side note: GNOME Disk Utility also includes the SMART test features.

Honest question (for you or anyone): what is the actual advantage/reasoning behind specific 'backup software' here (assuming a non-institutional/non-corporate, single-user, single-machine setup)? I've looked into such in the past and always been turned away because of some sort of proprietary data structure/compression/container format/etc attached to a learning curve beyond 'rsync will copy my data 1:1 to some other place, if the original place dies, the other place still has it hopefully' - maybe that's not the best way to do things though.

beachboy2 · 07-03-2020, 08:25 AM

obobskivich,

I have amended that link.

Thanks.

If you look at my blog you will see that GNOME Disk Utility's Drive Options precedes GSmartControl in suggestions for testing software.

Rickkkk · 07-05-2020, 11:37 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by obobskivich

... Honest question (for you or anyone): what is the actual advantage/reasoning behind specific 'backup software' here (assuming a non-institutional/non-corporate, single-user, single-machine setup)? I've looked into such in the past and always been turned away because of some sort of proprietary data structure/compression/container format/etc attached to a learning curve beyond 'rsync will copy my data 1:1 to some other place, if the original place dies, the other place still has it hopefully' - maybe that's not the best way to do things though.

Hi obobskivich,

I've been through a couple of different "backup software" solutions and have settled back on rsync. They all struck me as "front ends" to a functionality that either *was* rsync itself or similar to it.

To answer your specific question, the advantage I saw is the level of abstraction these solutions provide for a casual user, particularly one who does not want to use command-line alternatives.

I settled on rsync after running into some issues that the software could not adequately explain.

I create 2 backups : one on-site on a 2nd linux system (over my home LAN) and one off-site in another location (over the Internet). Haven't had any issues since.

Cheers,