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...

I have had a lengthy association with the "Work From Home" (or WFH) concept. As early as 2000, when I was at Intel, I wanted to WFH full time. At that time, I was working on a project that Intel couldn't have sold, but which was a tool that could make their internal testing much easier. This tool was something that my managers and I thought would be a perfect Free-Software/Open-Source project, and it seemed to be an ideal candidate for me working remotely. The concept of hosting a FLOSS project was rather alien to Intel higher-ups at the time, and it was decided to let the project die rather than FLOSS it and let competitors use it.

After Intel, I managed to make every aspect of my job at the U of A Physics Dept. able to be done remotely (Linux boxen were easy, of course, but the Win32 ones had a combination of Cygwin w/ SSH and VNC). This meant that I could WFH there, even though I very rarely did.

Then, at Progeny, we actually migrated to a mixture of WFH and working at the office for the last year of Progeny's existence. This worked better for some than others... but I'll get to that in a moment.

Finally, I landed at the Linux Foundation where I got to WFH full time. I have to say that I love WFH full time, and I tend to be a lot more efficient at my work when I'm WFH than when I have to drive into an office daily. However, there is one real problem with WFH. This problem is one of perception and attitude, and it's something that can be overcome. But in order to really be efficient at WFH you need to acknowledge this problem and rectify it.