[ltp] the purpose or advantage of suspend and hibernation

[Bjorn Knutsson]

On 21 Nov 2003 13:00, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 21, 2003 at 08:32:59AM -0800, Robert Hajime Lanning wrote:
> > 
> > Good point.  I think, I will install a cron to reboot every 20 minutes.
> > 
> > As for backups, I just backup my personal files to my home raid system.
> 
> I know you were being snide and sarcastic, but a really good thing to
> consider doing is to set up your laptop to automatically figure out
> when it's on your home LAN (possibly by looking at its ip address, or
> probing to see if your home raid-based fileserver's MAC address is
> available on the ethernet), and automatically doing an rsync to backup
> your notebook files if it is left on at 2am in the morning when at
> home.

I tried that, as it turns out, it really doesn't matter much when I
set the backup to be done, chances are I'll be awake and working. 
Plus, if you're doing backups of "live" file systems, you want to shut
down as much as possible before, so if you try the automatic approach,
you risk catching a lot of files "midflight".

> Otherwise, backups never get done, and when your notebook hard drive
> dies (notebook drives are less reliable than server or drives meant
> for the desktop), you won't be sorry....

This I will disagree with. My backups are manual, in that I start them
manually. They get done practically every day (I skip doing it on
weekend when I don't work much.) When I leave work, I basically run
"backup ; tranfer ; hibernate". When I work from home, I similarly run
"backup ; transfer ; suspend" when I go to bed in the evening.

It's just a question of discipline, and once you get to spend a couple
of days fishing for lost blocks on a dying disk, that discipline gets
real easy. Once you make a mental connection between backups and
shutting your laptop down, it becomes as natural to run your backup
before shutting down as it is to shut your laptop down before you pack
it down.

That said, if I'm in a real hurry from work, I'll switch to the
wireless LAN, start the sequence, stuff the laptop into my backpack
and leave. Most of the time, the backup is finished and transferred
before I get out of range of the WLAN.

/Björn