Just another day in paradise....

[Rich Z]

Things have been hectic enough around here, and when I think I'm about to buckle under the load, I get another truck load of crap dumped on me.

Started when I saw this little notice on the screen of my PC saying something like "backup failed on drive F:..." No big deal, I figured, as the software probably glitched. So later I went to look at some files on that F: drive (it holds all my data, like photographs and videos and such), and the system couldn't find it. Hmmm.. Well reboot the system... During the power on sequence, I noticed the RAID utility flashing "ERROR" for that array. Uh oh.... This array is a pair of Seagate 1TB drives set up in RAID 0 to make a total volume of 1.8 terabytes. I quickly filled up that 500gb drive that came with the system, so I figured I had better give myself some elbow room. Putting two drives in RAID0 gives you the capacity of both combined, plus gives the drive a speed boost because it is sharing the write between two drives. So each drive only has to work half as hard as a single very large drive. Yeah, sounds pretty cool, doesn't it? The drawback is that if one of the two drives fails, everything on both drives is lost.

So, that is what happened to me, apparently.

Fortunately those Seagate drives were less than 30 days old, so I just yanked them out of my PC, took them back to Best Buy and exchanged them for a pair of Western Digital. Certainly not something I planned on having to do today, but tomorrow and the next several days were not going to be any better. Since my 30 days would be up next Monday, I just had to make time to do this.

So here I am waiting for a format of a 1.8 terabyte hard drive to complete so I can try out a restore function from this backup software I've been running. Never had to use it before, so this is going to be REAL interesting. The problem with backups of this nature is that you never really test them, because to do so would likely destroy your real data if that restore fails for some reason. So you only get to test it when you REALLY, REALLY need it to work. Of course, Murphy's Law is seldom very kind and understanding.

Not really how I had hoped today would go at all.........