On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 11:14 (-0500), Allan Gottlieb wrote:

> At Sun, 14 Dec 2008 11:39:21 -0400 Jim Diamond <zsd@...> wrote:

>> On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 22:17 (-0800), Ardell Faul wrote:

...snipped...

>>> What a bunch of shit that is.

>> Your reply is neither helpful nor well-thought out. Just because
>> someone has a large drive in their laptop does not mean that they
>> don't have it backed up somewhere, so your assumption that they will
>> lose all their data if their disk goes kaput is just silly.

>> Second, Kris didn't say his data is important.

>> Third, the point of having a laptop is mobility. There is no point in
>> having a laptop if you have to carry around your desktop or external
>> drives to get at your data.

>> Or maybe I'm just a foolish person, like almost everyone I know who
>> uses their laptop as their primary computing platform.

> I agree. At home every morning I do a backup (dump) from the laptop to
> a desktop and via the internet to New York University, where I teach.
> Those days when I go to work, I do an additional backup to NYU and often
> a third to both sites when I come home. All these are performed
> partition to partition on the laptop in single user mode and then the
> directory containing the dumps is rsync'ed to the desktop(s) in
> multiuser mode. Plus I have a cron job that does an rsync of the
> live filesystem.

> I find it very convenient to have all my data with me at both sites.

Have you considered Unison? I've been using that for a while, with
good success. On the days when I go in to my university (Acadia), I
often work from my desktop, which means my updates need to be done
bi-directionally, which Unison handles nicely.

And when at home, I "backup" to another laptop there with Unison.

Ardell's comment that "having all of your valuable data only on your
laptop is dangerous" (which was part of what I snipped out) is quite
valid, it is too bad that he chose to phrase it in the way he did.
Regardless of how the message was delivered, at the risk of sounding
preachy, I encourage all of you to realize that it is not "if" your
disk goes bad, it is "when". You might be thinking that "it has never
happened to me", but there are a lot of people who *used to* think the
exact same way. At my university, all of the students have had
laptops for something like the last 10 or 12 years. And as much as
you can warn people about not abusing their laptop and backing up
their data, there are always a few who find out the hard way that
disks occasionally fail.

Cheers.
Jim