Shai Dorsai

I’ve been using PCs for a long while, and had a hard disk failure early in my career. Ever since then, I’ve been an advocate of backing up. In several places.

At home, I backed up individual PCs to a network server; that to a NAS monthly.

Key data(correspondence and precious photos) was backed up to CD and sent to my mum.

As internet connections get faster, online backup becomes easier. There’s a wide range of suppliers.

BT provide a Digital Vault  with 1 G storage for their broadband customers , 5Gb storage for their Total broadband customers, and up to 20 G for £4.99 a month.

Mozy  provide up to 2G for free home use, and Jungledisk provide unlimited storage (powered by Amazon’s S3 service)  for around 15cents per G a month.

So having said that, why the fuss about Knoppix?

I’ve changed our infrastructure at home, losing 2 servers, while adding some media kit. Backup moved to peer and jungledisk… I forgot to move some media files and some fairly important (though not vital) documents from the USB hard drive I’d moved them to.

The drive failed. Wouldn’t read in windows, tried a different enclosure, tried installing it as a slave/secondary disk in 2 other PCs. Nothing.

Then I remembered hearing about Knoppix  - perhaps that would help? I installed the bust disk in an old PII machine with 192M of RAM, hey, it was lyiing about. I’d burned Knoppix onto CD, and bunged it into the drive… powered up…

Knoppix started - albeit slowly - recognised the network, recognised the disk and allowed me to connect to the internet (so I could read any necessary tips, though it was simple enough not to require any).

I opened hda (which was the broken disk) and saw much to my surprise that my directories and files were there. I browsed the Samba neighbourhood, and found my real PC. Copied files over the network from one to the other.

If you haven’t tried Knoppix, can I suggest you get a copy, burn it to disk, and have a quick play. It really, really helped me out.

I’ve earlier alluded to using Facebook, and initially wasn’t sure what use I’d make of it.

I’ve actually been learning more and more in the last few weeks as I see what my Facebook friends have been doing. I learned about tiddlywiki, and its founder Jeremy Ruston moving to BT.

I’ve started using a Wordpress.com blog, imaginatively titled Is This Future Shock? (Yes, a nod to Toffler, and the paradigm shifts he envisioned), ,and found that I’m commenting on another Facebook friends blog about the change in internal communications.

I’d seen JP comment about Open Social, and next thing I know, I’ve spent an hour or so last night reading up about microformats. Now, if I decide to take that into my personal websites, I’ll be using the learning, too.

I’m learning more and more, but need to chat with guys in my community about how I can usefully structure my own learning - and how I can help open it up to people.

Of course, blogging here helps me think about - and will at least show it on Facebook.