On Mon, 18 May 2020 14:09:01 -0700
Rick Moen via Dng <dng@???> wrote:

> Quoting Ian Zimmerman (itz@???):
>
> > Last year I nearly lost all my image and audio data, some 100G. I
> > guess that's small potatoes today, but anyway _very_ valuable to
> > me. It happened because I gave the wrong /dev/sd* name in a dd
> > command when I was putting something on a stick, maybe it was Tails
> > or something like it. If only I had listened to my nagging inner
> > voice and looked at /dev/disk/by-id first, I'd have been okay.
>
> I'm a lot more concerned about servers, personally, and am not going
> to permit overengineered software on my server just because someone
> couldn't bother looking at 'dmesg | tail' before running dd against an
> SD card.
>
> (I do detachable backups to external USB hard drives, and make a
> point of doing 'dmesg | tail' before mounting, to make sure it really
> is /dev/sdc1 this time.)

Substitute the word "needlessly complex" for "overengineered" and I
don't like it either. But 1), I don't think you'd get anywhere near
universal agreement that by_path, by_id, etc is either overengineered
or needlessly complex, and 2) ANYBODY can make a typo, completely
unrelated to "not bothering to look at dmesg | tail". I think a more
relevant constructive criticism would have been "where were the
backups?".

SteveT

Steve Litt 
May 2020 featured book: Troubleshooting Techniques
     of the Successful Technologist
http://www.troubleshooters.com/techniques