backup and restore

I'm backing up my laptop's /home filesystem to my USB harddrive because I think it's time to change filesystems. /home is xfs. A few weeks ago though I found what seems to be a bad sector on that partition (an ISO image on /home had sections that were unreadable, although the same CD that the ISO was built from was perfect). Unfortunately, neither XFS nor JFS has the capacity to accept badblocks output so that the blocks found bad can be marked unusable (decreasing usable disk space a bit, but keeping data safe).

So I'm backing up my data (damn it's taking a long time to backup 37GB over a USB cable) so I can reformat /home as reiserfs (likely) or ext3 (less likely). And then it'll be another night of running badblocks so I can feed that to the new filesystem.

This isn't a big deal. I'm reading widely and playing chess against crafty (and losing every game). So it's not time lost. I'll go to bed soon and hope (but unconsciously) that the backup will be done by tomorrow morning, so I can format, badblocks, and slowly copy the data back.

This laptop doesn't have any S.M.A.R.T. options in the BIOS, so I can't take advantage of those options (apparently JFS and XFS rely on S.M.A.R.T. to handle bad blocks for them). Heck, since Ubuntu makes the IDE drive look like a SCSI drive, I can't even hdparm -d1 /dev/sda. I get:

/dev/sda:
 setting using_dma to 1 (on)
 HDIO_SET_DMA failed: Inappropriate ioctl for device

Yech. There's probably a way to force Ubuntu to treat the drive as an IDE drive instead of emulating SCSI for it. I haven't gotten around to surfing for that solution though. It's not important enough just yet.

The next morning: Wow, badblocks has gone through just a fourth of the disk and the badblocks file is already 135MB. I think I'll have to go with ext3 instead of reiserfs so that I can take advantage of the -c parameter to both mkfs.ext3 and fsck.ext3. Yech, I've always had more problems with ext2/ext3 than with reiserfs/xfs with corruption after powerloss. But I'm going to have to bite the bullet here. And anyway, it's a laptop. The only time the OS wouldn't be shut down correctly would be if there were some sort of kernel panic (haven't got those in a long time, since I stopped compiling and using win4lin kernels) or if I were to turn the laptop off. The battery works as a UPS, so I won't get instant off when the wall power goes out.

I should really buy a new harddrive, of course. I'm not able to just yet though, so I'll limp along with this one and make weekly rdiff-backups to the USB drive, and another rdiff-backup everytime I transfer pictures and videos of Timmy from the digital camera. :-)