[thelist] single user virtual dektop

[Viggie]

On Mon, 2011-08-15 at 15:10 +0100, Luther, Ron wrote:

> Hi Casey,
> 
> How about a teeny tiny little cloud?   ;-)
> 
> I'm thinking more like a home network where you could put a largish drive in a cheap tower box, tuck it away in a 'safe' location at home, and load your software and development system on that box.  Then use your laptop as kind of a thin client to remote into the hidden tower.
> 
> I spend most of my days sitting at home with a laptop remoting into a workstation physically sitting on the company backbone.  The Workstation does most of the heavy lifting.  I'm using the laptop as nearly a dumb terminal.
> 
> HTH,
> RonL.


I do keep a home server.  My work requires it.  But even if you keep a
home server & doing everything there, there is always a possibility of
hardware failure on this server.  You need tools/backups to get back the
server up as quickly as possible.

Since the original requirement was due to hard drive failure, & also the
single user cloud is not yet affordable/commonplace, may I point out the
other alternatives?

My question to original poster (Casey) is - how long it takes to get
back your laptop to working mode again?  It could be just 10 minutes
once the laptop got a new hard drive.  Please consider disk imaging or
disk cloning software for backups.  There are open source solutions
available (CloneZilla is a good one - you can boot from USB & restore).

For disk imaging, we can do it in 2 methods.  We can clone entire hard
drive or we can image specific partitions.  If entire hard drive is
cloned, restoring it to a new drive will take about 10 minutes.  That's
all.  The laptop will stare at you with the same software, profile
settings, passwords, folders etc. when you boot again!

The only catch is, if you have full hard drive image, your new hard
drive should be of same size or bigger.  Alternately you can keep
specific partitions cloned.  This way you only have to create those
partitions in new drive with exact same size of previous one and restore
those partitions.  It may take about 5 minutes for each partition.  For
first timers, the disk image/cloning procedure does have a learning
curve, but it's certainly worthy.

The idea is, whatever the reason, you cannot escape from taking backups.
After all you are the one to answer your clients.  Even if you have a
single user cloud, you will be at risk if you don't have backups.  If
you can restore in minutes, you can be at peace.

The hardest part is to backup regularly. :) 

Hope that helps,

Viggie
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