Due to a combination of a small hardware failure and a large amount of user error, I ended up in a situation where our home server RAID5 disk array was hosed and our backup disk was failing to respond. It was looking like we’d have to go back to month old CD backups… but it didn’t turn out that way. So thanks to:
- GND – I bought the server from these people over three years ago at Dave‘s suggestion. Turned out to be good advice. There was something about the Linux set up I didn’t understand. I dropped them an email, and a few days later I received a phone call from a technical guy, full of knowledge of how my machine was set up, and that helped me work out how to get the machine back. Great customer service.
- TestDisk – let’s say, hypothetically, while installing an operating system on one set of disks, you’d managed to corrupt the partition table of a different, and perfectly good, set of disk. Once you get past the “where did my data go?” shock, what do you do? Use TestDisk to fix the problem.
BTW, if you decide to have an off-site back up disk in your car, check the disk tolerance before you leave the disk in a car park in Heathrow during double-digit negative temperatures. At one point I looked into professional data recovery services to get the data off this disk. We didn’t need the service in the end, but Data Recovery UK were fast and friendly and quoted me £85 to perform an initial investigation on this 120G IDE backup drive. It’d then cost £350 – £900 to recover the data. Which I thought was fair enough, assuming you value the data.