HD Crash and why *nix is is better than Windows

Ok, so the site has been down for a week. That’s because my computer’s HD crashed. Fortunately, I was able to goto Staples and purchase 2 Seagate 500GB SATA drives. That’s 1TB purchased on a whim for $260! You couldn’t do that 1 year ago. I’ve set them up as a RAID 1 (mirror) so that one drive is a backup of the other.

Along the way, I had to copy all the stuff off the old drive, which caused an infinite loop for the automounter in both the Gentoo 2007.0 LiveCD and Ubuntu 7.04 CD. Using Ubuntu, you can kill the automounter, and mount by hand. I then copied all my data using ‘tar pipe tar’, (so that permissions, ownership, and timestamps are saved for all files) and saved this blog by exporting all the MySQL databases from within a chroot environment.

After installing a new OS (Gentoo Linux) onto the new drives. I just make myself a new user, and copy the saved version of my home directory onto the new system, making sure that my uid hasn’t changed. Restoring the website was just as easy: copy the webserver settings from the old HD to the new ones, and import the MySQL databases. The coolest thing of all in this world of paradise is that KDE has session management, and so all the browser windows that were open when the crash occurred just pop right back up, as if I’d never left.

Ok, so it took awhile, but I’ve got everything back. Let’s explore how this would have worked on a Windows system. Well, since that drive refused to boot, and then also refused to automount, all that data would have been lost forever. Even supposing that I could access it, I’d have to copy all my user preferences. That requires visiting many different directories, C:/Documents and Settings/User/* for most stuff, but then what about IE bookmarks, and email, or stuff on my Desktop? All this stuff resides in different places!! Fine, so you could, potentially, comb the system and save all that stuff. What about a website? Well, you can export stuff from a database just as easily (but that assumes it’s running, which means the drive would have to be booted). Pretending that we could’ve come this far, and that we copied all this stuff onto the new system, there’s still one last hurdle: All the applications have their default behavior restored! Customizations like that require copying registry entries, a prohibitively daunting task.

KISS wins again! You see, in *nix-land all application settings are kept in plain ascii text files in the /etc directory, and all user preferences are similarly kept in the users home directory. But in the world of Gates, user preferences are either in registry entries, or spread out all over the system in crazy directories, in proprietary binary formats. Windows as a software system suffers serious design flaws, and the fact that the name Microsoft is associated with computers, is an embarrassment to the industry.