In the past year or so, I've had more hard drives fail on me than in the previous 20 years combined (we got our first hard drive in our IBM PC in around 1985, I believe). I don't know what the cause is, but it seems to me that hard drives are getting less and less robust as the drive density escalates (and perhaps as the price plummets).
Anyway, two weeks ago, my server bombed.
I had been having some power issues for the past few months. The machines would shut down for some reason, and due to my mobo BIOS configurations, they don't come back up when power is restored.
I bought a UPS to try and mitigate the problem, but it just seemed to make the problem WORSE. About a month ago, I ditched the UPS, and things seemed fine. However, I had learned a bit about S.M.A.R.T. technology, and one of my drives started complaining a bit. I backed up parts of the system, but I didn't do a sufficent job.
I had also gotten badly ill right around the time the drive gave up the ghost. Luckily, much of the web stuff is on a different drive, so I just missed a few things. One of them, though, was a recent backup of the mysql databases. Not good.
The sites are slowly coming back up. I have to recreate the entries for my blogs, and some of my other sites need some serious work. Suffice to say, I need to get some backup cron jobs going ASAP.
Posted by flynn at June 11, 2007 4:09 PM