On my server, I have three 'root' partitions. One for general day-to-day use, one for a backup if something catastrophic happens to my main system, and one for

On my server, I have three 'root' partitions. One for general day-to-day use, one for a backup if something catastrophic happens to my main system, and one for experimentation. The extra disk space taken up for my having two extra 'root' partitions is a miserable 40-50 gig. But I know that I can swap operating systems over almost instantaneously and then back again just as quickly if I did something wrong. Great peace of mind for practically no cost. The second error I see in the article is to use software that we haven't used previously for something important. My first wife had the habit of trying new recipes when we had a dinner-party. I tried to tell her repeatedly to try the recipe on us first, then she would have it down pat when she wanted to impress. The third error of course was the need to have restorable daily backups and the use of them to restore the system when need be, associated with modularity of the system. I back up my whole system daily. but the most important part of that is not backing up the distro itself (we have re-installs for that) but backing up all the config files, all the databases, all the local binaries, and a current list of all of the installed distro packages. I can replace the whole operating system from a complete wipe-out in less than two hours. I store these backups in a pseudo-exponential policy. I have more recent backups, fewer older backups. Currently I have 15 backups covering 9 years, with five of those covering just the last 3 weeks, and four covering the last five days. To augment this, I have a monthly snapshot backup also stashed away. The other stuff, personal docs etc, is deliberately kept small. Total daily backup of base system and /home is approximately 12 gigs. That is easily transported on a USB stick. I don't store music, photos, magazine .PDFs, old software, etc in my /home directory. That stuff all goes in an archive directory that's write-once, and store (practically) forever. That gets rsynced to two external USB drives daily. Most days, there's practically nothing that gets transferred out. Having several times lost much valuable data, I suppose I am really paranoid, but I still think I haven't been paranoid enough.