Man, am I glad I had a backup!

[sundialsvc4]

It was "time for wintertime spring-cleaning" on my box, so I ran a full update, then "emerge depclean" (which got rid of a lot of cruft but not as much as I expected), and "revdep-rebuild" (which updated less than I'd thought).

Somewhere in step #2, all of the old Linux kernel-sources got removed, leaving only the binaries. Sure, the system would continue to run without them, but I didn't intend to lose them.

Fortunately... I have a USB/Firewire-capable external disk drive (which I connect to my very-old laptop using the Firewire-port that was designed for use with digital cameras...) and every single thing is backed-up to it (or to its identical, alternating twin...) by a rather-massive overnight rsync. Therefore, accurately recovering from the problem was "a snap."

This really reinforces the point to me that, while what I did definitely made the system more reliable and got rid of some "occasional hiccups" that were just frequent enough to have become really annoying ... "you gotta plan ahead to have an 'out.'"

I really learned this first-hand when one of the disk drives on a computer just ... up-n-died. Turned on the computer one morning and ... zilch. No warning, just an ominous clicking sound. The backup drives are organized exactly like the ones they replace, and it was literally just a "drop-in replacement." Yank one out of its portable enclosure, drop it into the computer, turn the computer on. Downtime: less than 10 minutes.

[timeBandit]

Moved from Portage & Programming to Gentoo Chat.
Not a support question, so moved here.
_________________
Plants are pithy, brooks tend to babble--I'm content to lie between them.
Super-short f.g.o checklist: Search first, strip comments, mark solved, help others.

[FallenWizard]

[notHerbert]

That's why I like rsync backups - almost no downtime if, God forbid, something unfortunate were to happen.

[overkll]