Trying to undelete something is too unreliable. What is reliable is backup, of course. Home users typically don't have tape drives and end up with machines that haven't been backed up in months, if ever. There are a number of "snapshot" mechanisms available on the web and one can always use rsync via a cron job to "backup" important information even if it's to the same physical disk drive. Having a spare /etc directory, for example, located at /snapshot/thisbox/etc that is 1 day old would have been a life saver for Mr Rabba. If one has 2 physical machines, then one box can snapshot the other box so that even disk failures can be anticipated. We routinely set up servers to snapshot Samba data areas because Windows users frequently ask for restores. Normally we create a snapshot partition specifically for the purpose, and usually it is an entire disk drive or RAID array. For home use, a separate partition on the one and only disk drive in the box would do nicely. Snapshots done hourly from 9AM thru 5PM allow an administrator to conveniently reach back to some time in the past and grab a file as it was at that time and get the Windows user out of the office. Taking periodic snapshots of the critical O/S directories is just as simple. Sure beats doing tape restores, and certainly beats reinstalling an O/S due to a mistake. Those snapshots are also space efficient. If a file didn't change during a particular time interval, then several snapshots of that file are all just links pointing at the one physical copy of the data. Total snapshot disk space required is roughly equal to the total amount of data being backed up, plus the amount of change that occurs during a specific time interval. Even file deletions are handled properly. It's therefore quite reasonable to have 2 weeks worth of snapshots captured at any point in time for lots of sites and the cost is a cheap disk drive or even just an extra partition at install time. -- Bill Gradwohl YCC (817) 224-9400 x211 www.ycc.com SPAMstomper Protected E-mail www.stomperware.com
