-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I want at this time to thank all of you for taking the time to provide various suggestions as to how to fix the problems I describe in my original post and in my previous thread 'Signs of hard drive failure?' My reason for the thank you is that early Monday morning 28 October I am leaving for Thailand and will not be back in Toronto until mid-April 2020 and so will not have time for any follow up before I leave.
Consequently when my Toronto computer is closed tomorrow it will not be opened or used for the next six months approximately. For those six months I will be using my desktop computer in Thailand which will have been idle from April 2019 to November 2019. I will however summarize here what I have found out so far in Toronto. With regard to possible hard disk failures, with the help of some of you I found out that the internal two hard drives have some life left in them. What had failed however some of my backup portable devices, a 1 tb portable USB hard drive and two of my six high capacity (32-64 tb) USB flash drives, all of which I use for back-ups. What I think had not failed was a SanDisk Extreme 500 (500 gb so they say, but somewhat less) solid state USB portable drive. So for my working files which I will be taking with me I am using one of the 'good' 64 tb USB flash drives mount on /media/fde, and maybe the the SanDisk on /media/ssda. My working files will be compressed into some twenty tarballs written to the fde drive, but not on the ssda for reasons explained below. I am also storing those tarballs in Dropbox. The scripts for these two devices follow. Both are encrypted. - ------------------------------------------------------ #!/bin/bash # Script to open and mount fde sudo cryptsetup luksOpen UUID=26bb9cea-4ac0-47fa-838b-067baeb1936f fde mount /media/fde - ------------------------------------------------------ #!/bin/bash # Script to open and mount ssda sudo cryptsetup luksOpen UUID=347eec80-ede8-4b10-bef6-24065ced3e97 ssda mount /media/ssda - ------------------------------------------------------- As I had found that all these scripts could operate without changing the working directory back and forth from /home/ken I removed from them all the lines changing the working directories which shocked, horrified and amazed many of you. The first script above works; it can open the fde drive. The second one does not work, but it will work if the tar command is extracted from the script and run independently in a virtual terminal. (By the way I have sudo set up to allow me to open every file without password, as this is the only computer on the premises.) The tar scripts now look like this. - ------------------------------------------------------- #!/bin/bash # Script to back up all browser files in directory /home/ken/mozilla. echo here tar -cpzf /media/fde/backups/kbrowsers.tgz --exclude-caches - --wildcards -T docs/tarlists/kbrowsers.lst - ------------------------------------------------------- This one exceptionally has 'echo here" above the tar command at the suggestion of Kushal Kumeran. Also at his request I ran the following two commands: 'which tarkbrowsers' which returned '/home/ken/bin/tarkbrowsers', and 'cat $(which tarkbrowsers)' which returned - ------------------------------------------------------- # Script to back up all browser files in directory /home/ken/mozilla. CURPWD=$PWD cd /home/ken tar -czf /media/ssda/backups/kbrowsers.tgz --exclude-caches - --wildcards -T docs/tarlists/kbrowsers.lst cd $CURPWD - ------------------------------------------------------- As this return includes the change of directories commands it is clear that somewhere there is a series of extraneous scripts but the software is being coy about telling me where they are. As about a fortnight ago all these scripts worked as they should have, it may be possible that the ones which do not work now are those which I did not change in the meantime. So here is where the matter stands now. I will be using these scripts in Thailand and determine whether these idiosyncrasies occur there, where I will have a buster machine instead of the stretch one I am still using in Toronto. So I may be on the thread again in Thailand, and or possibly again in Toronto in April 2020. Regards, Ken Heard -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- iF0EARECAB0WIQR9YFyM2lJAhDprmoOU2UnM6QmZNwUCXbTz8gAKCRCU2UnM6QmZ N1ZGAJ9oiCkQsjTrdBa3HC5p5+CqybdO4ACeIex9comH1W7x1H3mbt7N1Tdm0pI= =VKWL -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
