Like I mentioned in my earlier post, I have managed to rebuild our server into a better machine than it was. But for some reason the hard drive from the old server was giving me fits, trying to move data. Perhaps it was damaged somehow. I am not sure.
But I do know this: a backup of the backups saved our data.
The good thing about having a server is that you can literally take all of your stuff – photos, videos, documents, music, etc. – and put it all in one convenient central location. So we can stream music to any computer in the house (and we have several). There aren’t five versions of the same document floating around because no matter what computer you are working on, the documents are all saved to the same place. That is a great advantage, at least as long as nothing goes wrong. But Mr. Murphy loves to stop by for a visit from time to time, and sometimes terrible things happen that would have been difficult to predict (like Kelly’s old laptop catching fire). Or your server gets so much dust and pet hair in it that the motherboard dies. That’s a major disadvantage of living in an old house – LOTS of dust. And it’s compounded by two cats and two dogs shedding everywhere. When I cracked that case open, the inside of the server looked like it had been uncovered in some old tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Like a time capsule. I had periodically cleaned all of the vents and fans, but it wasn’t enough. I should have done more, but I didn’t.
But one of the things I did do right was reuse an old IDE hard drive as a sort of backup to the primary server shared folders. And I used that every few weeks, so that when I pulled it to see if I could get our old data off of it, it had backups dating over a period of two years, with the last one dated mid-May of this year. So it may not have every last thing, but it has the majority of it.
Now, once I restore all that data to the new server, I will keep the old drive around, separate from the server, just in case.
-Geoff
The Books are Taking Over... 