It was the best day of my life. I was seven years old, and for once—just once—I was completely free.

My mom were busy assembling a desk in the garage, shouting about tools, and my sisters were off in the yard, screaming over the hose like they always did.

Nobody was watching me. Nobody cared what I was doing. And that’s when I saw it: the back fence. Freshly painted. Green. Wet. Glorious.

I don’t know what hit me, but it was like magic. I dropped to the ground right in front of it, my knees in the dirt, my eyes locked on the paint. It glistened in the sun, almost glowing. I couldn’t believe it. This was it. This was my moment. I leaned in close—so close I could smell the sharp, chemical scent of the paint—and I just watched.

The wet streaks started to change right in front of me, bit by bit. It was like watching the world transform. The shiny parts turned dull, the wet spots disappeared, and the whole thing slowly came to life as the paint dried. I couldn’t stop staring. I couldn’t even blink. My heart was pounding like I was getting away with something huge. And I was.

When my mom called out, “Where are you?” I didn’t move. I didn’t answer. I couldn’t let this moment go. I stayed there, watching, until every last inch of that paint dried. It felt like I had discovered a secret universe, like I had broken some unspoken rule of childhood. Nobody else was ever going to understand it, but I did.

Even now, I can still see it in my mind—the sunlight on the fence, the smell of the paint, the feeling that I had found something special. Watching paint dry—exciting as hell.

It wasn’t nothing. It was everything. It was freedom, it was magic, it was mine—a true highlight of my childhood.

Remember to audit your backups!

When I migrated my old Arch servers to Debian with ZFS last year I also changed the entire data layout on the arrays. I broke things out into smaller sized chunks to make ad hoc backups run swifter, modularize things so I stood a change of remembering what was what just by doing a directory listing, that kind of thing.

All week I've been working on finally getting a web site going for the root of this domain. Basically composed of trying out a bunch of hugo themes, loading some markdown files from another live site into the content directory to see how it renders, yadda, yadda.

In the process of doing this, at some point I must have fat fingered something and deleted/moved the source files for the active site. I only discovered this when trying to copy the posts from the active site to a new one I was testing with a new theme.

rsync -av ~oldsite/site/content/posts ~newsite/site/content/.
"... No such file or directory ..."

Wat...?

Ok, whatever, start looking at the incremental backups... hmm, not there... not there... not there... wat? List the backup crontabs again... no reference. Other host with backups that don't match this pattern... not there... WTAF?!

The location where I have my web dev stuff located is not backed up at all!

In the root of the array where this is located there are 4 other directories that are backed up but for some reason this one is not. Either I had a blind spot on it or I forgot or I didn't set it up because there were no web projects when the server was set up or...

I got lucky - had made a bunch of copies while experimenting during the week and was able to find "out of band" copies of the files. But, if during testing I had blown away all my testing data without knowing there were no backups I would have not been happy!

Anyway...

Audit your backups!

Test restoring from your backups!

#Linux #backups #ArchLinux #Debian #hugo #gohugo #web #dev #soho #homelab