[ale] Hard Lessons - was Re: how do I list big files

[Ron Frazier]

Been there, done that, except for the 5 years part.  I have my desktop 
PC attached to a 750 VA UPS, which says 15 minutes run time on the box.  
Well, AT THIS LOAD level, the run time on that battery is 3 minutes, 
which I didn't know because I had fallen for the market speak on the 
box.  I happily pulled the plug, then nearly fainted as the PC abruptly 
lost power after 3 - 4 minutes.

My favorite backup is a cloned hard drive, which I can swap around in 
two minutes.  Didn't know that, didn't have that at the time.  I did 
have an image backup, but it was about a month old.  I had to restore 
Windows AND Linux (dual boot), and then recover data from an online 
backup and resetup everything within the last month.  So, my simple 
happy UPS test turned into a long grumpy sad 2 day system building 
exercise.  NOT FUN!

I learned a valuable and painful lesson.  That is that you have to 
customize the UPS settings to the situation.  If I let the computer 
drain this particular battery to 10%, or even 1%, which I think Gnome 
defaults to, it would literally have only 5 - 10 seconds to shut down.  
This is not enough time, even for Linux.  I set my Windows UPS controls 
on that machine to warn me at battery level of 85%, which is about 36 
seconds into the power failure.  Then, I set it to shut down at 70% 
battery level, which is about 1.1 minutes into the power failure.  At 
least, this way, it will have about 2.5 minutes to complete the 
shutdown, and it stands a fighting chance.

I still haven't figured out to control the shutdown settings in the 
Gnome power manager.  I don't think you can.

Sincerely,

Ron



On 03/22/2011 10:00 AM, Jim Kinney wrote:
> "hard" is when you have to do the first test of the recovery system: 
> make backup, pull the plug, restore from bare iron 5 years worth of 
> critical data.
>
> On Tue, Mar 22, 2011 at 9:31 AM, Derek Atkins <warlord at mit.edu 
> <mailto:warlord at mit.edu>> wrote:
>
>     "Lightner, Jeff" <jlightner at water.com
>     <mailto:jlightner at water.com>> writes:
>
>     > What is scary is there are still people today who don't see the
>     need for
>     > regular backups until something goes belly up on them.
>
>     coming up with a backup system is *hard*
>     implementing it is even harder.
>
>     -derek
>     --
>           Derek Atkins, SB '93 MIT EE, SM '95 MIT Media Laboratory
>           Member, MIT Student Information Processing Board  (SIPB)
>           URL: http://web.mit.edu/warlord/    PP-ASEL-IA     N1NWH
>     warlord at MIT.EDU <mailto:warlord at MIT.EDU>                      
>      PGP key available
>
>

-- 

(PS - If you email me and don't get a quick response, you might want to
call on the phone.  I get about 300 emails per day from alternate energy
mailing lists and such.  I don't always see new messages very quickly.)

Ron Frazier

770-205-9422 (O)   Leave a message.
linuxdude AT c3energy.com

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