back up!
April 11th, 2007 by Lawrence David
so my server took a bit of a vacation the last week or so. last friday, i decided to try and earn my yellow belt in linux administration as i migrated my filesystem to a raid 1 configuration. [damn you newegg and your cheap hard drive deals!!] i figured that although i do regular backups of my pictures and music, a perfectly mirrored fileserver would save me a lot of time when my hard drive inevitably crashed.
well, i found out that board does indeed hit back. i’d estimate i’ve spent a total of 24 hours in the past week recompiling linux kernels and hunched over raid manuals. so much for saving myself time. the most salient lesson i’ve learned is to not believe the lovey-dovey hype: linux can be a cruel and obstinate scamp. ultimately, i was forced to wipe down my entire hard drive, upgrade to debian etch, and offering all the major deities sacrifices as i attempted to restored my blog and gallery from backup disks. it would be the perfect irony if in a quest to make my fileserver more robust, i managed to lose all my data.
but thankfully, just like mr. miyagi said it would, hard work pays off (even if your opponent pulls a cheap shot and decides that it won’t read floppy or cd-rom boot disks). almost all of my webserver’s functionality has been restored; i even took advantage of my computer’s denuded case to install a snazzy new sound card. ahhh, it feels so good to be a geek.
