Scott Yang's Playground

What I have been busy with in the last few days.

Casualty list:

• Photos from the last 6 years. (Backed up on CD-R)
• Videos from the last 2 years. (Backed up on DVD-R)
• All Sunday sermons from the last 4 years. (Might be backed up “somewhere”, except recent talks)
• Anna’s website. (Only DB is backed up)
• FOCUS Gallery site. 5+Gb of photos is nowhere to be found. (Only DB is backed up)
• All my MP3’s. (Gotta re-reap them again from CD’s)
• Server that needs a rebuild. (Almost there)
• Many corrupted files that I have not yet encounter — many files are zero-padded half way through that you don’t know until you try to open it.

I think it was far worse than last time. Maybe the WD drives are more dodgy than the Seagate ones, but somehow I bought another WD for replacement. Hmm…

Verdicts:

• Make sure your Linux kernel log is not clustered with junks. If hard disk said he was sick, make sure you can see it!
• If hard disk was sick, make sure you act quickly. Even one day of delay can reduce the chance of recovery dramatically.
• Every brand is different. It took my Seagate a while (more than a month) before it gave out its last breath. My WD however, it was like “Argh! I am sick. BANG!!” Don’t procrastinate because of past experience.
• Need a good off-site backup solution. Something that automates so that I’ll never forget.
• Might also need to think about RAID1 mirroring at home. I don’t need blistering performance, but really want stability and redundancy.

I am still in the process of restoring the files from my old WD. From the progress it looks like it will probably finish in another 30 hours.