[ale] Y'all were right about Travan tapes - wish you weren't

[griffisb at bellsouth.net]

I've been happily backing my desktop up to a 10/20 Gig Travan IDE tape weekly. Chose to do a nuke restore twice after seriously hacking up my desktop. Figured it would be quicker to simply go back to the previous image and run from there. I was very impressed with the app, and with the ability to erase my hard drives and restore a good working image. A pretty cool thing. 

So where does the hassle come in? I decided to do some major hacking on my desktop. It was running SuSE 9.0, MultiMedia from Packman (added as an HTTP source), KDE 3.3 from a mirror. And a bunch of other stuff compiled and installed. Old stuff, new stuff, all over the map stuff.

Well, doing an upgrade didn't work very well. So I decided to just go back to last friday's tape. And the restore didn't work at all. Had some errors I couldn't get around.

Anyway - doing a clean install of 9.0. Also repartitioned the harddrive to move /home onto it's own partition. Will have to check the tape a little closer, and possibly toss it. 

At least I have a (hopefully) better solution for when the desktop is back up and running. I'll use the USB-attached 40Gig harddrive. Just have to hope the folks that recommended a laptop harddrive over a desktop harddrive aren't as correct as the folks that recommended I avoid using a Travan tape.