Moonrise, as seen through the pines in our yard:
The Pixel 3a produces exceedingly useful low-light images, mostly by having Google’s software compensate for its tiny lens and minimal light-capture area, with the downside of turning a peaceful night scene into harsh daylight.
Take the rest of the day off, OK?
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Thanks for the day off, Ed. Happy Holidays to you and yours, and thanks for all the science, engineering, and entertainment you’ve shared with us.
Sometimes, a Bad Example is the best I can come up with. [grin]
Thanks …
And a Happy Boxing Day to you, sir! I spent some time working on cloning the house-desktop machine, with the old one destined for the shop (refurbed Optiplex FTW). Got to the USB backups and things went sideways. Now I understand the wisdom of “no_create_root 1” in rsnapshot.conf. Amazing how much damage a filled up USB drive can cause. Apparently, it’s possible for such a drive to redo its own UUID when things get out of control. Recovering from an unsuccessful write of fstab* is more interesting than I wanted to spend the evening. [wince]
(*) Root FS was full, and I got a zero length fstab from the edit. Haven’t crashed that way before. I let an install disk write a new basic fstab, but I need to learn the better way with a bootable USB stick.
Your UUID and rsnapshot posts came in handy.
Oh well, fresh drives on the older and newer machines, and All Is Well with shiny new backups.
Discovering UUIDs are written in a disk sector (or whatever) came as a surprise: your disk can be as unique as you want!
I’m still not clear on what happened, though I did a few things wrong. It seemed to have room the last time I looked, whenever that was… I never changed the drive, and I don’t know what happens if you exceed rsnapshot’s monthly backup quota. At the time, the drive appeared to be full. I just mounted it with the new (self-created UUID), and the only data is a bit in lost+found. I’m now backing on a 2TB drive left over from an unused Win7 laptop, with a 1TB drive in reserve.
I ordered a couple of Toshiba USB drives, and will swap them quarterly. I’ve found that I seldom need backups older than a few days, so a one-year rollover should work.
Haven’t decided if I’ll be using USB drive backup in the shop computer. Because of the 38F default temperature in there, it’s rough on drives. The DVD drive in the old Sony hates winter (even after I swapped it for a newer one), though the CDRW drive below it works all right. If I feel I need backups on that machine, I’ll look into a SSD solution. I usually don’t do original work on the shop computer; it’s mostly for displaying drawings and playing mp3s.
And no, network backup isn’t viable. 600′ worth of airgap handles that, and the shop/barn is not set up for datacomms.
Perhaps a cheap SSD on a USB-to-SSD adapter? SSDs tend to wake up completely dead, but for non-critical backup “no moving parts” should work well in the cold.
Yeah, might do the trick. Thanks!