I set up a cron job to backup my web sites to my Mythical Convergence Box, just a simple rsync of the subversion repository and, to be safe, /var/www. The latter was 500Mbytes.
Next morning the cron job had run and my server was inaccessable. Oops, with 10g of WoW and 10g of family photos I had filled the main disk up, my 250g Myth disk being mounted on /var/lib/mythtv. The box hadn't crashed but it was in a kind of coma, you ask it to do something and it went urgh.
I had to reboot into recovery mode and move the photos to the mythtv disk, leaving me 68%. Observations:
- Interesting how hard the system failed when the disk filled up. Have to be careful.
- Linux recovery mode is actually useful! Whenever I've tried the (admittedly pre-vista) Windows recovery modes it has spent a quarter of an hour loading drivers for obscure disk controllers, then I've tried the automated recovery that never works, then I've rebooted, I've waited another quarter hour, then it's given me something with the raw power of a 1985 dos prompt, then I've given up and reformatted the disk.
Last night my cron job worked fine and my websites are so thoroughly backed up that my head is spinning.
Peter's Moblog
