April 1, 2010
This week’s techmail is Using smartctl to get SMART status information on your hard drives. Smartctl is awesome, and having it monitor your drives on a constant basis will likely give you the early warning “oh crap, something is wrong, backup NOW!” that people can really use. I know it’s saved me a few times (and a few times it hasn’t). Since it comes with every Linux OS and is not “expensive” to run, I highly recommend taking advantage of it on the off-chance that it does give you that early warning.
Of course, the use of SMART monitoring is not and never will be a replacement for having consistent and verified backups.