Why GNU/Linux Rocks

[devilock76]

Hmm, that's awesome. So it erased 210Gb of data on my C: drive just to install a 50GB linux partition? That totally sucks. It worked fine on my computer, not sure why it wiped hers. I am going to take it to a computer repair place tomorrow to see if they can fix it. I can't believe it managed to wipe the whole hard drive, I didn't choose the option to wipe the drive, it was only supposed to use the free space. This totally sucks.

I dislike the fedora way of partitioning a drive. I always recommend using the booable gparted image to resize a existing os partition before doing your actual install for any distro, even if the distro installer actually ues gparted itself.

Ken

[sgreger1]

Don't know what you got going there, but you need to minimize writes to the hd if there's still data to recover. I'd suggest making a bootable USB/CD of PartedMagic, and SEEING what your disk looks like. It's easier getting a grasp on the situation when you can see a graphical representation of the disk.
http://partedmagic.com/doku.php

A data recovery program. I've never used it, so you're on your own, but you may find stuff to get back...
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec

Partitioning's dangerous, and valuable data should always be backed up first. It's especially dangerous because it's easy to do, and it /usually/ goes well. That fosters complacency, and stupid mistakes happen. Sometimes you do everything right, and it still goes tits up. When you get everything resolved one way or the other, now's a good time to work out a REGULAR backup routine for you and your family. That server you have would be a great place to do offsite backups, and setting up something local would be useful too. A RaspberryPI would make a fine server for some local storage.

Well I was backing things up, but it was only to a recovery partition, which somehow also got corrupted during this whole thing. I have a full copy of everything on her computer from about 60 days ago though on a NHS server I have in my house. So I was backing it up regularly, but the last 60 days have been lazy. So really there isn't much being lost other than some word documents from the last month that can be recreated.

She is tired of windows so she said to just wipe the whole thing and install only linux on it and be done with it. I'd like to salvage those few word documents for her but now sure how much effort that is going to take.



If I do wipe it, how the hell do I do that from within linux or in the Bios? How do I just wipe everything, and then start over?

[sgreger1]

I dislike the fedora way of partitioning a drive. I always recommend using the booable gparted image to resize a existing os partition before doing your actual install for any distro, even if the distro installer actually ues gparted itself.

Ken

Yah that's what I did when I installed it on my computer, but on hers I figured I would use the Live Bott CD tool that claimed it could partition it, but letting it do shit on auto apparently was a terrible idea.

[sgreger1]

So if I wanted to wipe the whole disk and start over with a fresh fedora install, can I use the first option on the boot CD that says "Format hard drive and install Fedora"? Will that automatically delete everything (including the current fedora install) and then re-install only fedora? Does anyone know if it makes the appropriate partitions or if that needs to be done beforehand?

[shikitohno]

The first option will take care of all the partitioning for you. Everything on the disk will get wiped as a result. It may offer you options for how large you want partitions to be or which filesystem you want to use. Or it might just take care of it all and give you some decent defaults. I forget which, it's been a while.

[devilock76]

The first option will take care of all the partitioning for you. Everything on the disk will get wiped as a result. It may offer you options for how large you want partitions to be or which filesystem you want to use. Or it might just take care of it all and give you some decent defaults. I forget which, it's been a while.

This, and on large hard drives most of the extra space will go to /home.

Ken

[sgreger1]

Got it all up and running, wiped everything and started over. Still can't get streaming WMV's to play in Firefox despite instaling every codec on earth, totem, mplayer, vlc etc. What's odd is that it works on my regular computer, not sure what I did different.

[lxskllr]

Partitioning's dangerous, and valuable data should always be backed up first. It's especially dangerous because it's easy to do, and it /usually/ goes well. That fosters complacency, and stupid mistakes happen. Sometimes you do everything right, and it still goes tits up. When you get everything resolved one way or the other, now's a good time to work out a REGULAR backup routine for you and your family. That server you have would be a great place to do offsite backups, and setting up something local would be useful too. A RaspberryPI would make a fine server for some local storage.

Guess who fscked up their installation...

I'm good at giving advice, but not following it. Currently installing Debian testing, and I'm hoping I'll be able to get back some of my stuff with forensic tools. I don't think I lost anything super important. My most important things are pictures of my daughter, and I think I gave them all to my mother on the tablet I got her for Xmas. This is a huge PITA though, and I lost a bunch of stuff that's nice to have. My problem is I don't have anything to back up to. I'm short on money, and short on drive space.

I spent most of yesterday dicking with the system, and made some critical errors. There were a couple points where I could have recovered, but failed to recognize them. Also, I had some issues installing Debian. I used a sid liveCD, and kept getting errors. I guess it was a bad image. I finally got it using a testing ntinstall. I'm currently sitting at a Gnome3 desktop, and installing Xfce, and E17. My confidence is shot :'^(

[devilock76]

Guess who fscked up their installation...

I'm good at giving advice, but not following it. Currently installing Debian testing, and I'm hoping I'll be able to get back some of my stuff with forensic tools. I don't think I lost anything super important. My most important things are pictures of my daughter, and I think I gave them all to my mother on the tablet I got her for Xmas. This is a huge PITA though, and I lost a bunch of stuff that's nice to have. My problem is I don't have anything to back up to. I'm short on money, and short on drive space.

I spent most of yesterday dicking with the system, and made some critical errors. There were a couple points where I could have recovered, but failed to recognize them. Also, I had some issues installing Debian. I used a sid liveCD, and kept getting errors. I guess it was a bad image. I finally got it using a testing ntinstall. I'm currently sitting at a Gnome3 desktop, and installing Xfce, and E17. My confidence is shot :'^(

Everything we have like that critical goes to the home server and is replicated to a 2tb external hd. Nothing irreplaceable is ever on workstation only.

Ken

[sgreger1]

Guess who fscked up their installation...

I'm good at giving advice, but not following it. Currently installing Debian testing, and I'm hoping I'll be able to get back some of my stuff with forensic tools. I don't think I lost anything super important. My most important things are pictures of my daughter, and I think I gave them all to my mother on the tablet I got her for Xmas. This is a huge PITA though, and I lost a bunch of stuff that's nice to have. My problem is I don't have anything to back up to. I'm short on money, and short on drive space.

I spent most of yesterday dicking with the system, and made some critical errors. There were a couple points where I could have recovered, but failed to recognize them. Also, I had some issues installing Debian. I used a sid liveCD, and kept getting errors. I guess it was a bad image. I finally got it using a testing ntinstall. I'm currently sitting at a Gnome3 desktop, and installing Xfce, and E17. My confidence is shot :'^(

Sorry to hear about that Lx

The worst part is that with Linux, it takes a while to set up. I spent a few hours just installing all the codecs, programs etc after I got the OS on there.

How much data do you typically have that would need backing up. Are we talking <16gb? 100GB? 200GB?

If it's only a few gigs, I have some spare SD cards and USB sticks that could give you a few gigs of storage, so that this kind of thing own't be a problem in the future. If you have more than that, you can feel free to rysync it to my dedicated server that has lots of space, assuming the content isn't personal in nature. I imagine there is a way to truecrypt the items you want to back up and then you can FTP it to my server so that it can sit there safely but won't be able to be accessed by anyone but you.

I have the NHS server at my house that I use as a cloud storage device, but I am trying to learn how to set up rsync on my dedicated server so that I can get it to save a copy of all documents on my linux partition. Does anyone know if this is hard to accomplish? When I get my raspberry Pi, this will probably be it's function. Have it backing up the really important stuff on a large SD card or something.

[lxskllr]

I appreciate it sgreger, but I have a lot of small storage. I could probably use 3 1tb drives. One for my main system cause it's getting old, one to use as backup, and another for redundancy. My problem is this computer didn't start out as being a primary machine, but it slowly morphed into that role. When i set it up, I couldn't have cared less about the data on it. Now it's become more important, but my mindset didn't change. I have enough storage for the imporatant bits and bobs, but I need to get a real solution together, and not let things go for so long. I could have uploaded some stuff to my UbuntuOne account, but neglected to.

Oh well, live and learn. I'm still setting crap up, and I'm a little lost. I've used Xfce before, but not as a primary desktop, so It'll take awhile to get customized. I'm playing with E17 on and off. That's way foreign, so I'm concentrating on Xfce for the time being. I need to upgrade to sid also. I should probably do that first. That way if I break something, there'll be less time lost :^D

[sgreger1]

I appreciate it sgreger, but I have a lot of small storage. I could probably use 3 1tb drives. One for my main system cause it's getting old, one to use as backup, and another for redundancy. My problem is this computer didn't start out as being a primary machine, but it slowly morphed into that role. When i set it up, I couldn't have cared less about the data on it. Now it's become more important, but my mindset didn't change. I have enough storage for the imporatant bits and bobs, but I need to get a real solution together, and not let things go for so long. I could have uploaded some stuff to my UbuntuOne account, but neglected to.

Oh well, live and learn. I'm still setting crap up, and I'm a little lost. I've used Xfce before, but not as a primary desktop, so It'll take awhile to get customized. I'm playing with E17 on and off. That's way foreign, so I'm concentrating on Xfce for the time being. I need to upgrade to sid also. I should probably do that first. That way if I break something, there'll be less time lost :^D

You're using 3 1tb drives? Jesus christ man lol.

One thing I love about Linux is how small the programs are. Installed all the necessary stuff on my moms computer and it only ate up 99mb, that's with libreoffice and everything. Absolutely amazing. (Number was obtained via du -h which I assume is correct). (The 99mb was for software, the OS was a few gigs)

[lxskllr]

I don't have 1tb drives yet. I haved a mix matched collection of old drives, and I'm guessing I could fit verything I needed into 1tb. The other 1tb drive would be for backups, and the other would be to backup the backup if you get where I'm coming from. Drive prices are expensive right now due to flooding, but once prices normalize, having two backups will be quite feasible.

So far my install is ~10gb, but I need to remove a bunch of stuff still. My problem is I like Gnome apps, but don't like the desktop much anymore. They have weird dependencies, where sometimes I'll go to remove something I don't want, and something I want will be attached to it. I'm just taking it slow. I'm a little gun shy at this point :^D I'm also thinking about sticking with testing for that reason, but haven't completely decided.

[sgreger1]

Hey my mom wants itunes so she can continue buying music, but obviously itunes isn't going to work on Linux because Linux is the antithesis to everything apple stands for. I do not want to set it up in wine either. The question becomes, where do linux users go to download music for $.99? Is there something similar to the iTunes store that can be accessed from linux? Prefereably something that isn't just a webpage frontend, like something that will catagorize, play her music etc, plus load it onto her ipod?


Edit: Has anyone used Ubuntu One Music Store? It looks like the itunes equivalent, but I am wondering if it will run on Fedora. I am sure there is a way. If anyone has used this let me know how you liked it. I know it syncs your purchases with Rhythmbox, but I was hoping to use Amarok. Either way, I guess I could just have her buy stuff off amazon.com, but then it wouldn't automatically sync with her music player. She isn't real great on computers so simplicity is key here.

[sgreger1]

Lets talk about backups:

In light of everyones issues with losing data, I really need to set up an automated backup scheme, but don't know what is the best way to go about this.

Does some CLI software exist somewhere that can automatically watch certain folders I tell it to watch, and keep a copy of whatever is in those folders routinely backed up on my server? Is this what rsync does? Is there a way for it to know if a change has been made to the file, or will it just re-upload the whole thing? Can this be automated, so that it backs everything up in said folders maybe once every 5 days or something?

I have two machines which need to be backed up on one server, and I would like it to be as automated as possible. Will rsync do this?

Also, is there a way to compress the backups as a tarball or something so they dont take up as much space on the server, like a way for it to automatically compress the data and upload it after it's been compressed?

I hear is rsnapshot pretty usefull. It uses rsync to generate and store snapshots of the directories that you specify. It hardlinks files that haven't changed, so disk space isn't wasted by copying duplicate files. Is this the best solution for backing things up? And by "snapshot" do they mean like a copy of everything in any given folder? I'm not looking to back up system files, only pictures, documents etc.