Back from the USA and, after a brief, hectic but most pleasant interlude entertaining and being entertained by Aussie friends it's back to the grindstone. I have a mountain of letters, emails and phone calls to write / make / do following the U.S. trip and the small matter of a magazine to put together over the next few weeks.
I returned from the States to find that one of the hard disks in one of the servers here had crashed, losing the entire content of my software repository. No biggie - all the machines here are backed up at least nightly to the big NAS server so the task involved no more than installing a replacement hard drive and restoring from the backup. A new 320GB drive was duly ordered and installed and (thanks to Acronis) with just a little bit of fiddling with Windows drive letters all the data (about 150GB) was back on the server in pretty quick order - though it could have been quicker had I installed the gigabit ethernet cards I had intended to buy a while ago - a job for later this month, methinks, especially as the network switch in the garage has now been upgraded to gigabit - thanks to a special offer that couldn't be turned down.
Before installing the new drive I had checked on the current inventory of drives installed in the machine which now runs Win2K3 - an odd mix due to the historic nature of ths particular beast thast started life as the primary LAN server here running good old NT (hah!). The error that was being reported for the faulty drive was "unable to read MFT". In my experience, the loss of the MFT (master file table) on an NTFS drive is more likely to be due to some form of software driven corruption than hardware so I left the old drive in the machine and, once the data was restored, told Windows to delete and recreate its partition. Bingo, the drive sprang into life without a problem and, diagnostics report no errors.
This leaves me with the worrying question of just how the data was lost while I was away and (in theory at least) the machine was inactive apart from servicing the occasional DHCP and DNS request for the network. A thorough check with anti-virus and anti-spyware software revealed no nasties present so it may just get written off as one of those questions that never gets answered.
I don't like those questions but I may just have to play wait-and-see with the machine to see if it happens again.
In the mean time, another example of how important it is to back up regularly. Without the backup, this would have proved - if not quite a disaster - a major upset and time taker. Later in the week, another example had me giving thanks to backups in even bigger style after a planned upgrade to the mail server caused a system fault that saw the complete machine become unusable.
No comments:
Post a Comment