[TriLUG] My Epic Demo Fail

[Dwain Sims via TriLUG]

Folks:

Just a postscript on my Epic Demo Failure that happened at the meeting last
night. And this morning.

For those of you who missed out on really nice evening, here is a quick
recap.

My demo was titled "The Ghost of Christmas Backups" and my intention was to
show some of the things I have been experimenting with to get a more
constant and hands-off backup for my primary Linux Mint 18.1 laptop (a
circa 2010 Toshiba!).  I was going to primarily show "Back in Time" which
mimics MacOS TimeMachine a lot.

I was all prepared for my demo; I did a final walk through at around 4:15
yesterday and all was well.  I shut down around 4:30 and packed the laptop
in my bag.  I got to the very nice Red Hat venue (Thanks Michael!) around
6:50 and prepared to set up.  To my shock, I was greeted with the grub
rescue prompt.  The partition table on my SSD was gone.  It just was not
there.  Disappointment!

So basically I talked about the importance of backups and I had a perfect
case of why you need them.

I am still not sure what could have happened.  My suspicion is that
WereSync (one of the solutions I have been tinkering with) may have bit me
- likely with help from pilot error.

So this morning I set everything back up on my desk and was still greeted
with "grub>" (no surprise).  I then booted System Rescue CD 5.1.2 and
checked to see what partitions I could see.  None.  Still no surprise.

I then ran Testdisk 7.0 from the menu and selected sda (my SSD).  It could
clearly see my partitions after I ran "analyze"!  (cheers and fanfare!)

I issued the "write" command, and the tool claimed success and told me to
reboot.

And to my great happiness, Linux Mint 18.1 booted right up as if nothing
ever happened.  All is well.

And my "Back in Time" snapshots are there as well, which could have been my
ultimate fallback if System Rescue had not worked.

I still plan to wipe this SSD and reinstall with Mint 18.3, but I will do
it in a much more methodical process in the near future.

Thanks for everyone's patience with my total demo failure last night.

Dwain Sims