2014-05-18 Today, I backed up the data of Dream's harddisk. There was a /home partition with only user data. On my mobile machines, the user data is typically partly original and partly a selection and copy of the stuff I have on other machines (which I can't access when I'm offline). Hence, I sorted the stuff and transferred it as appropriate. (I used `cp -a' and rsync(1) for the transfer.) Fortunately, I have enough free space on my home server. It's so much more relaxing when I don't have to care for disk space. I can create a dd image of the whole partition, if I like to, or rather, if I think this would be a good idea. The root partition was not mountable, hence I wanted to draw a dd image for further repare work. (I do learn from my mistakes!) Unfortunately there was a read error, thus the copy failed. I couldn't copy the whole blob; I couldn't mount the filesystem to copy parts; what else could I do? I tried to repare the filesys- tem, though: fsck.ext3. I thought, I could simply refrain from invasive reparing. Fsck found an error in the journal. This came from the last hard crash. Fine, I could live without the journal at all, because I just wanted the backup but not use the system any further. Hence, I allowed fsck to repare the journal. And -- tada! -- I was able to mount the file system. :-) I don't keep the whole root filesystem, but only individualized parts. Mainly these are /etc, /root, /var, /usr/local, /usr/src. As a measure against data pollution, I selected at the time of backing up, not at the time of restore/retrieval. This may or may not be a good idea. http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke