Re: [eia] French catching up

[Joel Uckelman <uckelman@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thus spake "J.J. Young":
> Could someone send me a copy of the most recent map file ?  I recently lost
> everything on my hard drive.
> 
> -JJY

I can't, since I use VASSAL instead... However, I *can* recommend various
things to prevent data loss. (This happens to you guys shockingly often.)

1. RAID-1: Mirrored drives. This protects you against single-drive mechanical
failure. For this, you need an extra drive and either a RAID card or an OS
which supports software RAID.

2. Nightly backups: This protects you against data corruption and deletion.
I have a script which is run once per day which backs up anything which
has changed since the previous day, and backs that up to another location
on the _same_ drive.

3. Nightly backups to a remote location: This protects you against
mechanical failure, data corruption and deletion, and the loss of your
whole computer. (Happens: lightning, floods, cossacks). If you don't have
a remote system under your command to which you can do this (like I do),
then you have some other options. I've heard that there are plugins for
Google Mail which lets you use storage space there as backup space,
as well as various online services which let you backup a modest amount
of stuff for free, even. (There was a NY Times article reviewing some
of these maybe a week ago. Ah, yes, here it is: 

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=990CE1D71730F937A35752C0A9619C8B63

If you want to read it, hurry, before it recedes in to the part of the past
you have to pay to see online.)

I do all three of these things because I'm (justifiably) paranoid about
losing data. Since 1997, I've had something like a dozen hard drives
die on me, but not once have I lost any data.

-- 
J.
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