skeptomai

Monumentally, profoundly stupid

... or how I learned the lesson of making backups.

I've been planning for quite a while to upgrade my home firewall machine, running OpenBSD, from version 3.3 to version 3.5. Tonight I started the process and like a good little boy, I backed up all the important stuff, before 'turfing' the machine (rebuilding from scratch). I backed up my home directory, stuff in /etc... other miscellanea. Trouble is, I got a bit fuzzy with the 'rsync' parameters. Anybody know what the '-n' parameter does? Yeah, that's right. It means "tell me what you would do, if I issued the command for real." I wasn't actually backing anything up. I was faking it. After I reformatted the firewall machine hard disk and installed 3.5, I moved to the backup machine to retrieve the important files. Only my home directory was there. The greatest lost, of course, is pf.conf. I have some bizarre rules based on the peer-to-peer stuff, various multi-player games, etc. I now have to rediscover that information and recreate the file. I suck.... yes, indeed... I suck