In my general browsing today I encountered the following very useful post from Carlo Wood concerning recovering deleted files from an EXT3 filesystem. I've never done an "rm -fr ~" on any of my machines, but I've certainly had enough filesystems die on me, and done enough stupid things to appreciate and fear the ramifications of lost data. Hell, not two weeks ago I had my desktop die on me in a spectacular way.

Anyway, I began to wonder what I'd do if I encountered a similar problem as I use XFS instead of EXT3. (Several years ago, I used Reiserfs, but after a catastrophic Reiserfs-related meltdown I switched.)

Then I realized I use rdiff-backup and have incremental backups of all of my data since Summer 2007 (when I started using rdiff-backup :-) So I probably wouldn't need to go through the pain of having to restore low-level XFS transactions.

I am very enamored with rdiff-backup. In fact, if rdiff-backup were a woman, it would be a no brainer to cheat on my wife with her (unless she already was my wife, of course). I also think I have a pretty clever system set up for my backups, so I'm going to share it with you all...

VirtualBox presentation to be given at CINLUG 6 June meeting.

Recently I've had a need for virtual machines as I have to run various distros for work-related testing. Traditionally I probably would have just chrooted all my work and called it good, but I was very busy with other things, and decided to try real VMs instead.

The problem is, I didn't want any high maintenance ones that required a lot of tweaking and configuration (like bochs or qemu) and I also didn't want any proprietary hunk of shit like VMWare. So it was with great delight that I found VirtualBox.

Friends and regular readers of this site know I have had numerous and continual problems with email. Part of it is that spam is such a prevalent problem (and has caused me to create several
iterations of an anti-spam system).

Another part has always been the email clients themselves. I've tried everything, but it's been very hard to fit my needs exactly.