 I've just put in an order for the external drive you see here. It's nothing that exciting, but it's still pretty cool — 600 GB of RAID-5 (unformatted; so I'll actually have 400 GB when I'm done). So if I have a drive failure, it beeps at me, and then I pop out the dead drive, pop in a new one, and it rewrites the lost data without me having to go through this hassle again! Yay for fault tolerance and redundancy. As a point of trivia, IAM currently runs on a RAID-1 setup (just mirrored). Within a week or so (assuming there's no major hiccups with the restore process) it'll be running on basically a much faster version of the enclosure above (Ultra-whatever $$$CSI versus cheapo IDE). |
Today was the day the drive was supposed to be ready. Eventually they confirmed that they'd restored all but 13 files (about 500k of data lost, all easy to restore stuff). They'd successfully mirrored my data to their imaging drive and were ready to restore it. Sounds good right? So I picked up a 200 gig drive to save the recovered data to and drove out to Markham.
When I got there they told me I was going to have to wait until Monday because it would take a couple hours to copy the data and they weren't sure if the copy would be done in time. I emphasized my need for the data and they agreed to shoot for 7PM. I went and hung out in the Chinese mall next door to kill the time, but at 5:10PM or so I got a phone call with some bad news.
While they did seem to have an image of the drive made, when they started copying, they discovered that they could not access many of the files, which sort of stumped them — it was as if their drive had suddenly failed as well. They've got one of their senior techs looking at it now, but it sounds like some strange kind of logical error (rather than a physical error) to me…
They also did a bit of a “holy crap” when they realized that there were tens of thousands of viruses in nearly every configuration on the drive. I don't know if they thought I had the most infected computer in history, or if they thought I was deploying virii for a living. Anyway, I explained to them that it was simply because I archive all of my mail, so I tend to “back up” a lot of virii (that have never been executed).
So as of now I'm waiting until tomorrow to hear from their senior tech, and until them I'm manually rebuilding what I can to prepare for a worst case situation. I still think I'm going to get back all my data… I really should be doing something more aggressive about it, but right now “all my magic” is tied up with a far larger spell.
The only good part of the story is that on the way home I discovered a Nigerian restaurant that I'd never seen before just around the corner from here and I jotted down the number as I drove past (for my notes: 385 Keele, just north of Dupont, 604-3942). If I have the time to take a break tomorrow (unlikely, but one day), maybe I'll shoot up and have a fufu snack.
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