Present Perfect

As usual, as time goes by and spring blossoms disks fill up to their maximum capacity everywhere. This past month it happened both at work and at home. This is more annoying at home since I have less time to react to it when it happens, and it messes up Kristien's ability to do recordings when it happens on the home partition of that machine.

So I decided to make a quick inventory of what I had lying around and I was shocked. Apparently, on the three machines I have running at home, I now have over a Terabyte of online storage. Wow. I still remember when we started getting Gigabyte hard drives, and how we used to marvel at news stories of Terabyte machines.

Half of this Terabyte is mirrored with software RAID as well, so underneath it's actually 1.5 Terabyte of raw storage space.
My largest drive is 400 GB, which is in my media PC in the living room, and that one was only half-used, so I could move some extra content from various /home partitions to that drive, freeing up the space necessary for more mirroring of Fedora Core stuff, and backups.

Beside that, I also seem to have collecfed 11 non-connected drives around the place. Some of them are quite useless these days - I have perfectly fine 6 and 20 GB drives for example -, one is the drive I dropped, some contain actual files, or backups, or old live systems but with a few bad blocks, and so on.

So I'm going through them now, using e2fsck to check and mark for bad blocks, so I can use some of them as emergency backups for content I already have mirrored somewhere else. I'm guessing that's pretty much the only thing slightly-broken hard drives can be good for.

Tip of the day

If you have large drives these days, remember ext2/3 reserves 5% of those drives for the root user. If you have a 200 GB drive just for, say, mirroring install trees, you're wasting 10 GB of space that never gets used. Use

tune2fs -m 1 (partition node)

to reclaim most of that space. I ended up recovering a good 100 GB all over this way, which is half a normal drive these days :) And at work, the same thing gave me a stay of execution for now.

Well, if it helps you decide on your wardrobe, I'll be wearing an "I'm with Stupid" t-shirt. As usual, as time goes by and spring blossoms disks fill up to...