As mentioned earlier, one of the projects I've been tackling the last few days is massive cleanups of the filesystems of my home desktop machine, bartfan, and my home server/gateway machine, bartserv. This was particularly inspired by the discovery that, for the past couple of months, I hadn't been backing up various partitions. On bartfan, my old 500GB drive was experiencing unrecoverable read errors during Dirvish rsync that caused the rsync to fail. On bartserv, a change in rsync on the bartfan side had caused the bartserv request-checking code to start erroneously rejecting the incoming rsync connection. That's a lot of un-backed-up stuff… Fixing the bartserv problem was easy, because I had some diagnostic infrastructure in place from previous Dirvish experiences. Sometime soon I need to post my Dirvish infrastructure on github; over the years I've gotten it to be pretty reasonable.
Fixing the bartfan problem was an easy but tedious and error-prone process. It turned out I had enough free disk space on the three other drives on my system to get rid of the few hundred GB on the failing drive. However, much repartitioning, partition resizing, and the like ensued. I took this opportunity to also move some storage around on unaffected partitions, balancing some things out.
At the end of the day I had all the hardware and software the way I wanted it. I took a look at the date code on the 500GB Maxtor drive I had just pulled. Some decoding later, I concluded that this drive had been manufactured in mid-2007. Yes, that's right: 6.5 years of heavy continuous use. I do like the new SSDs a lot, but I really can't complain about spinning media overall either. (B)