As sysadmin I am talking about Backups every day, as things can break very easy. But are backups always usable, up to date and compatible?

I was testing some software as suddenly my KDE crashed and the profile assistant launched. My settings were lost. What now? My backup is on a pc 25 km away from here – so I had to improvise a bit. So I set up a new profile for me as I was using my old one with me since KDE 2.0 and we’ll be talking about KDE 4 soon.

And now the optimistic part of all: Things I remembered as being broken worked again – even the mysterious kdesvn crashes are history. So I won’t restore my backup and apply the settings manually.

Moral of the story: starting over from scratch might solve some problems.