I was using my personal laptop at a meeting yesterday and grabbed about a gig of files from someone’s usb key. While I was taking minutes, I noticed a lovely new icon that popped up… your hard disk drive is failing. Eeek! Not cool. So, last night I got home and started backing up my files. A few of the new files and a couple unimportant old files didn’t transfer properly.  Fine, I could live without them.
Today, I bought a replacement drive. When I got home, I wanted to record the diffs from last night to today (quite a few since I uncompressed a lot of that gig’s worth of files). As I started that up, I received a lot of notices about the *backup* disk failing. I tried fixing it, but no luck. Found a new backup disk. Re-backed up 30 gigabytes worth of data. Verified that and installed the new drive. Things worked pretty well. I installed Fedora 11 for the second time in two weeks, restored all my personal files and now I’m updating the system.
I’m just glad I verified the backup prior to doing this – it would have been annoying