Christmas Crashes and Other Tales

Another year, other Christmas. Technically it was even a White Christmas ... technically? Well it didn't actually snow on the day, but there was still plenty of white stuff still on the ground from earlier in the week.

A Christmas Dog Walk!

However it wasn't all tinsel, turkey and presents - with an absolutely immaculate sensing of timing our AV File Server (Audio Visual) decided to crash on Christmas morning. Well it didn't so much crash as die ... completely, utterly and irretrievably. I was adding some extra storage to it and this required a reboot. Everything was going smooth and by the numbers, until the server didn't restart after the reboot. Some fairly rapid and frenzied diagnoses later it was determined that its motherboard was completely kaput. For those in the know, not even beep codes. Ho hum.

Open heart surgrey on a mini-ITX server

 If it was mid-year you could get a replacement motherboard next day, however given it's Christmas and half the country is buried in snow, the earliest we can get a replacement here is Thursday :-(

For once I can feel fairly smug at this point as all the data was backuped before I started and anyway it sits on an external storage array - a Drobo (www.drobo.com).

The Drobo temporarilty sat on a desk

So the Drobo was moved from the rack to a temporary home on the office desk and hooked up to one of the desktop machines. This was renamed and re-IPed so, like Clark Kent emerging from a phone box, it's now masquerading as the AV server. Serenity, films, photos and music, has been restored to the household.

So the moral of this Christmas Tale? - Always backup your data!  This was just an annoying inconvenience for us, which ate a bit of time. It could have been much, much worse; the data on this server is all our digital photos (~50,000), music and various home movies. A thousand, thousand memories. I know you never think it will happen to you, but one day it will. PCs break, disks corrupt, CDs and DVDs fade. Remember, data isn't real until it exists in at least two places, so always, ALWAYS, have a backup.

So a final thought for Christmas - where does the rise of the mobile phone and the subsequent demise of the phone box leave Superman? Caught short and exposed? Don't let your data be ;-)

Merry Christmas!