Power failures and Gaim

We have had quite a few power failures lately in my area of the town, both at home and at my building in the University (which is kind of logical, as we are so close). Power failures tend to happen at the worst possible time - Yes, I know that basically any journalling filesystem will assure the disk integrity is right even if the last information written got lost. Which has happened to me quite a few times. Some weeks ago, we had the power failure in the middle of an aptitude operation. Darn, I lost /var/lib/aptitude/pkgstates and /var/lib/dpkg/available - Not too much hassle to re-create them, so no too much damage done - but, yes, it made me lose some time and temper. Now, fortunately I don’t have Aptitude running all the time - those important files are rarely touched. However, there are some programs I am running basically all the time. One of them is Gaim - And it is the only one that continuously suffers from such disasters. Every time I lose power, .gaim/blist.xml gets lost. And that is quite annoying - No critical information is recorded there, only my contact list. And fortunately, contact lists are now saved server-side on most protocols I use Gaim for (yes, I do use Gaim for IRC - I am rarely connected to any channels, so I don’t suffer its lacking interface too much). But I do have important information there - For example, the real name of people. I hate that habit of the MSN crowd of just changing their alias as if it were some kind of useless blob - effectively, turning it into an useless blob. Thank the Gaim people for letting me override that… But it is very frustrating to be forced to group them all together again according to my style and finding out who the hell is each of them. Yesterday, I lost it. Twice. Well… as of now, .gaim/blist.xml lives on my CVS tree. I am not yet convinced to take all of my home into version control (basically because I am too disorganized), but files that are written to in such an unorderly manner do deserve being in a safe place.

Comments

Gunnar 2005-06-06 07:48:14

RE: Power failures and Gaim

XFS. And this CVS trick is no good - Gaim deletes and recreates .gaim/blist.xml, breaking my symlink :-(

Ta^3 2005-06-05 01:32:59

RE: Power failures and Gaim

Which file system are you using?