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I just lost the last 8 months worth of email. Eight months. Everything. This is one of those times where I really really really hate computers.
The story behind this is that I reinstalled Linux today. Something had broken a while back, but I didn't have time at school to really mess with it, so I just waited for the Christmas break. So I decide to start fresh, and I make a backup of my user directory. Everything seems to have been burned fine, and I go ahead and format it all. The install runs beautifully, and for the first time in a long time everything seemed to work right out of the box (except for some known issues wiht my soundcard, but I had already figured those out). I copy over some of the other files, like my website files, and everything goes smoothly. Then it comes time to copy over my email files. I have about 280 megs of email accumulated over the past 3 years or so, and I noticed when I was copying them I kept getting "Stale NFS file handle" and "Input/output error" on a lot of the files. So it finally finishes, and I notice that most of the mbox files, the files that all the email data are stored on, are empty or else just contain the first few lines of the file. I then try reading the data off the cdrom, and it only reads so much before it crashes. Windows can't even open the files. So my last backup is dated August 14, 2003, and I figure, well it's better than nothing. But no, I check that, and it is also corrupted. So my last good backup is dated May 5, 2003. Almost 8 months old.
Everything else copies over fine, so there's just something in that email folder that was corrupted that transfered over the cdrom that caused all this headache. The only good news is that I don't *think* there was anything incredibly important (as in my life is over if I didn't have it important) in all that email, but there was an awful lot of stuff that would be very convinent/nice to have. Such as the laptop confirmation email I recieved yesterday. Or the email telling me when I can register for basketball since I've forgotten. Or the email my friend had just sent me with his cell phone number on it.
I also finally saw Return of the King tonight. Yeah yeah yeah, I know I'm a bad nerd for taking so long, but I just hadn't had the chance. Muy good movie, I recommend it.
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