Well so far, I have been unsuccessful in retrieving anything off my dead drive, but I still have a few more tricks up my sleeve. But sadly, the tricks are slowly running out so I'm not exactly thrilled at the prospect of losing everything. Keeping hope though.

I've pretty much decided what I'm doing in the aftermath of my hard drive failure. Without my 400GB drive, my server is almost at its storage limit so I'll need to get a replacement. I plan on picking up a 1TB SATA hard drive and dumping that into my server. I'll be doing some moving of data around to allow for better room alotments, and since Hardy Heron (Ubuntu 8.04) comes out in a couple days, I'll reformat the root partition and bring my server back online.

Anyway, wish me luck

Tags: server, harddrive, dataloss

I write this in hopes that anyone who reads this learns from my shortsightedness. Saturday I went and started up iTunes on my desktop to listen to some music. Well, my network share was unavailable. I figured that samba on my server just needed to be restarted. I restarted Samba, no luck. I look at the uptime, 91 days...I figure maybe my server just needs the rare restart. To make a long story short, the 400GB hard drive that stores my server uploads, music, and documents just went to shit. Bad sector somewhere and I couldn't read anything off the hard drive. Immediately I went out and got a 500GB external hard drive to use for backup. I thought great, now I can backup my music and other important stuff, as well as use it for Time Machine on my Macbook Pro. I manage to get into the hard drive, but am still unable to successfully do much more than that. I now have the hard drive in an enclosure connected to my Mac in hopes of repairing it with fsck but so far it's been unsuccessful.

I'm hoping and praying that I can get it working just long enough to transfer the data, but so far it looks bleak. If this is unsuccessful, I might try the freezer trick, but we shall see. I'm crossing my fingers.

On a side note, I like Time Machine, I just have one comment on it. Time Machine will back up everything on your drive except that which you choose to exclude. Personally, I don't care if Time Machine backs up my system files as I can always just reformat in the rare situation that I have to reformat. What I wish it did was only back up the folders you set it to, rather than backup everything that you don't exclude. Oh well though, seems to be a nice tool either way.

So my final point that I want to make is just this. If you value your data, find a way to back it up. Be it the periodic burn to DVD/CD or whether it be to an external hard drive. Whatever your method or choice of methods, just do it, you'll thank yourself later.

Tags: sucks, dataloss, server