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Fun

I’ve been very busy lately, not only getting ready for college, but also having fun. This week will be my last chance to see my friends for a long time. Maybe even a long, long time. I’ve been out spending time with a lot of them (the ones who aren’t working all the time or are already in college, that is). Between going to the beach at night, seeing cheesy movies, checking out bookstores, and bowling, I’ve hardly had time to think that soon I’ll be facing the biggest obstacle I’ve ever encountered in my life. And that’s just how I want it. Ignorance is bliss.

My sister has long wanted to go to South Beach, so yesterday, we got some people (Yamilee, Austin, Luke, Justin, and Lisa) and did it. Austin graciously drove us around; he didn’t mind it because he often makes the long, boring drive between here and Florida State University. After we found everyone’s houses and got to a parking lot in Miami Beach, we ate lunch on the patio of a restaurant called Cafe des Arts. It was really nice, and since we were in the shade, we didn’t die from the heat (well, most of us, anyway). Then, we actually hit the beach for a little while. There were a lot of people there, but it wasn’t crazy. I went in the water, which was pretty warm. Later, we dried off and went to Starbucks. We followed that up with some shopping (or, for some of us, walking around in front of shops), until finally, it was getting late, and we went back. I really enjoyed the afternoon (no, we didn’t stay for the wild and crazy night life), and I’m glad I got to have fun with some of my friends for one last time.

Backing up the files on your computer is very important. Your mother always told you to do it, but you never have. Until recently, I never had either, but I decided I should definitely start doing it since I have a laptop, which is fragile and could be stolen or what have you. I got a 500 GB SimpleTech external hard drive (designed by Pininfarina) for my sister and me to share. Even though the drive came with backup software for Windows and Mac, it was formatted as NTFS, meaning only Windows could use it. I reformatted it to FAT32 so my sister’s Mac and my Linux laptop could both access it. Then I decided I’d probably be better off using a more sophisticated filesystem for my own backups, so I resized the FAT32 partition and made an EXT3 (Linux’s filesystem) partition. It was a clumsy solution (Linux apparently can’t write to HFS+, OS X’s filesystem), and it seemed mess things up. My dad decided it would be best for us to have separate backup hard drives. After that, I wiped everything and reformatted it all as EXT3. I was troubled to find that the only accessible as root. Since the drive was mounted at /media/disk, I fixed it with

sudo chmod -R 777 /media/disk

I then went into the file browser as root (sudo nautilus), went to the drive’s properties, and set its permissions so that everybody could read and write it. After that, I didn’t have any problems. I was still bothered by the fact that the drive had no label. Given that the drive was located at /dev/sdb1, changing its label to “Backup” was simple enough:

sudo e2label /dev/sdb1 Backup

I don’t know how the drive could be in /media and /dev at the same time, so obviously, I don’t know a lot. I looked that stuff up on the Ubuntu Forums, which have helped me out immensely over the past 6 months I’ve been using Linux. There’s no way I would have known what to do otherwise.

Actually backing up files was difficult — at first. I copied and pasted my home folder into the external hard drive, but some files refused to be copied. When I was still using FAT32 for the whole drive, I found out how to tar entire directories, so I tried that. Five minutes in, I realized that FAT32 doesn’t support files more than 4 GB, so I calmly waited another 45 minutes for the backup to finish, only to delete the resulting archive. When I finally had the whole drive formatted as EXT3, I looked into SBackup, a GNOME utility for backing up and restoring files. I backed up the folders it recommended that I back up, and it took about 45 to 50 minutes. The program is designed to run backups in the background, but I didn’t want to partake in too much CPU-intensive activity while it was busy. Restoring files should be just as easy, but I hope I’ll never have to. (I probably will, though.)

Now I must pack. I have to pack pretty much everything I own into little boxes by tonight, and I haven’t started yet. The next time I blog, I probably won’t be at home. I’ll be gone.

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