On a side note, this does make me happy that I kept the / and /home partitions separate. If it's not the hard drive and I have to re-install an OS at some point, at least that will be simple.

The automatic fsck on boot encountered errors it didn't know how to deal with, so it aborted, dropped me to a recovery shell (thanks Fedora) and asked me to manually do it. So I did. Perhaps the problems here are just from random, anomalous freezes (still going back to open radeon driver) and file system inconsistency due to hard rebooting. Ah well.

I've just lost my panel applets again. A large chunk of launchers, that is. Ah well. It feels ominous. I am otherwise presently rsync'ing my home directory onto my external drive. I obey the methodology outlined by Mike Rubel. It's pretty nice and pleasant to think about. I should replicate it somewhere in case that page ever goes down :)

Essentially, he advocates a methods including the one I use (and trailing slashes are important):

mv backup.3 backup.tmp
mv backup.2 backup.3
mv backup.1 backup.2
mv backup.0 backup.1
rsync -a --delete --link-dest=../backup.1 someSourceDirectory/ backup.0/

Once I have a better storage solution, I think I will go through my computer and 'archive' stuff. That is, I will remove data I rarely use to external storage. While it might impair access to my information, the idea will be that it wasn't anything I was really using, anyway, and that I'll have a cleaner home directory. Also, perhaps I should have a networked file system solution, where I (and I alone) could access my data over the Internets. I wish I knew more about web security in that regard. I have a very patch-work knowledge from a variety of experience. (I am grateful for that one co-op job.)

I suppose I should retire for the night now. I'll note one grievance I have with Blogger, though: I really dislike how it presumes I want implicit <br />s everytime I use a newline in my text, even though for actual publishing I have the option disabled. Tee hee!

Storage

Oh, unreliable storage. My USB key is dead, it seems. It had been experiencing issues being detected all week, and now that I really want to bring something off of it, I cannot, for it won't be detected at all. Oh woe. I will probably require a new one and presently browse Futureshop and Staples. It is almost sad that I almost exclusively consider the larger retailers for trust and price reasons.

UPDATE: it has made one final (?) contact.

It's brief history saw it purchased in the semester 2006 Winter during a co-op work term. I purchased it from a Canada Computers. I thought the design on it (OCZ Rally, having a race car-type logo) was very ugly and I regretted not letting it be more fashionable, but it had been on sale. I think it was 512MB for $30 or so. The cap quickly lost its grip and during the summer following was lost. The USB key never seemed to suffer from it, despite all the foreign particular matter it must have come in contact with through my pocket. Now, 2 years after its purchase, it is dead.

Now I know a bit more about USB keys, so I hope to get a nice fast one. I think the warranty is still valid on my OCZ Rally, but the warrant information would all be at my father's home. I might try to claim that when I get home next, but I believe I'll need a USB key in the interim and it would be nice to have a bit more space. Though, honestly, I think I will only go with 1GB for their price.

Good bye Rally. I had hoped your logo would fade into the night before you did.