Hard Drive Troubles

The hard drive in my server (this blog's namesake) seems to be going down for the count. It works for a while, but then gives errors and requires a power off and on to come back to life.

It is times like these where a man learns if his backup procedures are sufficient. My grade on this exercise is maybe a B-. Here's the status:

The directories setup for each member of the family, plus the one containing photos are backed up fine. I was able to grab a second copy of all of this from the ailing disk that I put on some spare desktop space. This is the stuff that would be difficult to replace (although all of the photos - save the past month - are also backed up to DVD and stored offsite).

Our music files, some 15GB, are not included in the nightly backup because of disk space reasons. Most of the files that I've put there are backed up at work. Many others come from CDs in the house. Losing these files would not be horrible, but it would be a pain to reconstruct. Plus, my kids don't backup their music, so that stuff would be lost. (Most of their stuff wouldn't be a big loss, in my opinion) I was able to copy all of this to another location.

I'm also a podcast listener, and I have a big cache of unlistened to files. Since I don't really keep track of what I move to the MP3 player, I'd have to guess a new starting point for each podcast. Once again, I was able to suck these files off the injured soldier.

Amongst these podcasts are downloaded TV shows that I haven't yet watched. I'm trying to copy these now, but I've been through a couple of reboot cycles without getting them all. The fact that they are large files (250MB+) doesn't help.

Here's the tough part, the system files and configuration don't seem to be backed up. Not sure why I left that stuff out of the backup routine. While I have good notes in this blog on my decisions and steps, it will take a lot of time to reproduce once the drive is replaced. Hopefully, I'll be able to keep the old drive working long enough to copy the files over. I've found a website with instructions to help this process (recover disks, grub configuration, and UUID changes are involved). Of course, I may want to upgrade to a newer Ubuntu version. We'll see.