Colin's Journal

Today I finally made good use of the daily backups that my computer performs.

Many months ago I wrote a Python script, RSyncBackup, to perform incremental backups onto a separate harddrive. Having a snapshot of my home directory, and thirty days worth of changes to it, has rarely been useful, but always reassuring. Today however, I’m very glad that I have it.

This evening I need to pull out an email I had received earlier in the week, but when I looked for it I couldn’t find it. A few seconds later I realised that I had two emails from today, and then the next oldest was from 2002! I am guessing that I must have corrupted my email inbox when I killed my email client (Evolution) earlier in the day.

Thankfully I have my daily backup! The last snapshot was from yesterday evening, so I could simple export todays email, restore from this backup, and import todays email back again. Nothing has been lost, and I’ll definitely be more careful killing off Evolution in future.

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