stuart miller

Please pardon me if this has been posted recently, I have been disconnected
for a few weeks with a host of problems, hard drive and personal.

In the process or recovering data from a bad hard drive, I ended up dealing
with a few duplicate backups.
1- In the course of checking, copying, moving and deleting a lot of files,
kde crashed a number of times. Is this common on 2006 and 3.4.2? I did not
loose any files, as far as i can tell, but is is an inconvenience.

2 - I was frustrated that there was no right click menu item for 'delete',
there is just 'trash'. I found this slow, so I moved a bunch of files to a
'to delete' folder, then moved its' contents to trash periodically. This
worked fine, until I somehow slipped with my click. In the process of doing
a 'select all' inside the 'to delete' folder, konqueror moved me to the
server root directory. I did my 'select all', move to trash, and had 200
gigs of
files instantly disappear.
PANIC
All the folders & files were sitting there in 'trash' - amazing. I was
expecting that the trash bin would have limited capacity, like the other
common os.
Is it really that good? I find it hard to believe that such a catastrophic
error can so easily be remedied. And, it is a good thing there was no
'delete' option, or I would have been using it.

there are a few lingering questions, though
- the 'restore all' quit when another folder could be restored because its
parent had not been restored yet. This left a bunch of entires in the
'trash' which appear to have been restored. Is this normal and ok?

- is there any way to confirm that everything is 'back to normal'? other
than the usual route of testing directory sizes and random file checks? Is
there any need to confirm this?

I have always been so paranoid about losing files, and so careful about
keeping things, I don't know how I could have been so careless.
Perhaps it has something to do with konqueror's habit of opening a
directory when you hover over it in the process of 'drag & drop'. Is there a
way to turn this annoying ( and potentially dangerous) behavior off?

Thanks

Stuart

bit twister

man rpm so you understand the results found in /tmp/verify
rpm -Va > /tmp/verify

robert m. riches jr.

The above command works even better if you regularly run it
(and maybe "rpm -qa") and keep the resulting file(s) around
for comparison purposes. If you have a "before" baseline
file to compare against, then you can know the mismatches
reported by the new run are fine and can be ignored.
Without such a baseline, it's difficult to know for sure.

Being as I'm _really_ paranoid (having lost a bunch of
terminfo files once upon a time), I run "rpm -qa" and the
equivalent of "rpm -Va" immediately before _and_ after each
batch of package updates or significant system change. I
run "diff" between the 'before' and 'after' versions to see
whether there are any new serious problems.

--
Robert Riches
spamtrap42@verizon.net
(Yes, that is one of my email addresses.)

stuart miller

Thanks for the rapid response.

i'm ok with rpm, and i'm not at the point of reinstalling any packages yet
..
As it happens, the multiple backups were all data files living on my file
server machine - my web server configs and website, a lot of mp3 files from
several different sources, lots of do***ents. The machine that went down was
a dual boot mandrake and xp. I was able to save everything, and was sorting
out duplicates when i 'goofed'. I also had a total backup of my son's
computer on there and was deleting the application files & keeping the data

I still have all my backups but there is a great deal of work involved in
sorting out the versions and the duplicates. I'ld like to avoid digging
through a 200 gig backup drive and a 250 gig usb drive, if I can. When I get
this done I will do a total backup and delete all previous backups

The linux install itself is working very well - i'm not going to mess with
it.

I guess i'm just concerned that the unintended trip into the trash, and the
restore, didn't damage aything.

Stuart