Don’t Store Things You Care About In /tmp
By Bob Plankers on Feb 27, 2008 in Featured, System Administration
“Hey guys,” he says, stepping into our office. “I have a problem.”
“What is it?” we reply.
“Now that I’m back from vacation I find all the data for a project I was doing is missing.”
“Restore it from backup.”
“It doesn’t seem to have been backed up, either.”
“Where was the data?”
“/tmp.”
“Ever heard of tmpwatch?” It’s now obvious why it’s missing and why it didn’t get backed up.
“No…”
Moral of the story: /tmp is for temporary stuff, not your big project’s data.
1 Comment(s)
By Jason Young on Feb 27, 2008 | Reply
I’m not sure this was a developer or not, but I’m guessing “yes” based on the last post.
I have *zero* pull in our Computer Science department, but I’ve always wanted to teach one freaking lecture in every project course I could about “system administration for developers” or “don’t be a moron and *actually* understand the system you are on and the recurring processes on said system”
One can dream, can’t he?