Steph's MacBook is affectionately known as the FrankenMac. It was built from the parts of 3 other MacBooks. The other night it started going into what seemed like swap death. Turned out to be catastrophic hard disk failure. Also, in what can only be described as a massive oversight, her laptop was not being Time Machined (whoops).

Anyway, after trying and failing to read the disk back using targeted disk mode plus dd_rescue on another Mac, I ended up swapping the disk into my Thinkpad last night and booting an Ubuntu LiveCD, ran dd_rescue and copied the hard disk image to an external hard drive. The filesystem is a little corrupted, and OSX can't read it... but Linux can! [Gotta say, this surprised me.]

I probably could have just booted the Mac itself with a LiveCD, but after targeted disk mode didn't work, I was worried it might be a logic board failure (let's just say Apple and I have a jaded history regarding logic boards). Also, I forgot for a bit that Macs can run Linux.

Since it did just seem to be a bad disk, I went and bought a new hard disk today, and have just successfully gotten the machine reinstalled and running again. The FrankenMac lives again!

So in summary, I am secretly brilliant, and Steph now has a 500GB USB harddisk to use with Time Machine.

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Most time you have a limited space on the remote SFTP/ SSH backup server. Here is the script that periodically cleanup old backup files from the server i.e it will remove old directories. Requirements Script will automatically calculate date from today’s date. By default it will keep only last 7 days backup on server. You can easily [...]

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This question asked again and again by a new Linux admins: How do I perform backups for the Linux operating system? So I am putting up all necessary information you ever need to know about backup. The main aim is to provide you necessary software, links and commands to get started as soon as possible. Backup is [...]

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