Scary day at work
Wow. So I worked at the office for basically 12 hours today.
Our server’s hard drive crashed, losing all it’s data (months worth of work). One minute it was working fine, and the next, it was completely empty. No formatting or anything. It just all disappeared without explanation.
“Well, no problem. We made a backup a couple days ago!”
So we loaded the backup drive. Lo and behold, half the files were missing on it as well!
In desperation, I pulled up google and looked up disk recovery software. 3 hours later, in the midst of the plethora of useless junk out there I found a gem called “File Scavenger“. Within minutes, it somehow scanned the entire *empty*, *un-recoverable* hard drive and managed to extract every single file that had existed on it before. To top it off, it even found a bunch of long-forgotten, deleted files as well!
Needless to say, we learned our lesson. We immediately proceeded to the nearest Fry’s Electronics. $500 later, we had all the equipment needed to set up a redundant RAID data backup system and were back in business. Now we have two different 250 gig Serial ATA drives set up in a RAID 1 (mirrored) configuration. If one of the drives fails (or even simply becomes unplugged from it’s cable), all the data will still be accessible by the network users. Awesome.
To top it off, we also have a third 250 gig drive. But this one is external. So we can make a mirror image of our data and take it home every night just in case our office burns down or the server gets stolen or something.
The way it should be done.
November 23rd, 2005 at 9:17 am
Yipes Tommy. Well I guess you can be thankful that you were not only able to recover the data but now you have new skills to add to your knowledge base.
Hey, have you seen Dankia yet?
November 23rd, 2005 at 9:39 am
Nope not yet. She’s still in the preemie ward I think
November 23rd, 2005 at 10:01 am
Wow. Honestly, I’m surprised you guys didn’t have a redundant setup already. But hey, I guess a good scare is worth its weight sometimes. I’m just glad you guys didn’t lose anything irreplaceable!
I need to write you sometime, man.
November 23rd, 2005 at 10:42 am
This is Mom, not Charity.
Wow! I guess that WAS a scary day!
Nice to hear from you, Tommy!
What are you doing for Thanksgiving?
Love ya!
Mom
November 23rd, 2005 at 12:33 pm
Hey mom! I’m planning on going to thanksgiving with Chris and his family to one of their friends’ house.
What are y’all doing?
November 29th, 2005 at 1:12 pm
It’s a shame that nothing is completely reliable. Saddening thought.
But I hear LaCie makes great hard drives. What do you use?
November 29th, 2005 at 3:29 pm
Yeah the external one that died was a Lacie. And we’re having a lot of hassles now, trying to get them to honor the warranty. They said that if we send it to them and they don’t find a problem they’ll just send it back.
Oh well… It’ll all work out.