A few emails of great importance were reaching my inbox. At least, that’s what they were claiming. “Important! Please check”. Over a couple of weeks, they would keep reminding me. I had ignored them. Understood the message but still, couldn’t be bothered. Guess I had a different definition of important. And then, all of a sudden, it happened. My custom-built NAS had died and I lost terabytes of data. RAIDZ-1, four drives, the second one just failed…
It was an experiment. Back when I didn’t really know whether I would need a proper NAS or something more optimally tailored for managing virtual machines and containers. So I opted for a bit of a hybrid solution and, since I had no idea what I was doing anyway, gave the whole setup a couple of months before I’d have to rebuild it from scratch — months I thought I’d invest into tinkering some more, learning the system’s intricacies and how it could best serve me. Ten years later, the initial experiment was still serving…
Subconsciously, something was going on. Before the incident, I began to diligently move my important data to a miniPC. After all, RAID is not a backup. Neither are snapshots, by the way. Well, sort of. Some would probably ignore linguistic nuances such as backing up data vs. state. You’d need to be a bit of a computer nerd/linguist for this kind of mental gymnastics. In plain English: snapshots are state backups. But sure, if we want to nitpick: when the proverbial shit hits the fan, they won’t do shit to prevent data loss. As evidenced by my situation: RAIDZ-1 + periodic system snapshots and I still managed to lose terabytes of data. Shouldn’t have ignored those emails, I guess.
All those movies and TV shows…Gone! And anime, too. I’m not a weeb, though. Just appreciating the art and good storytelling. The music was safe, however. I mean, how else? Music has always been planned with proper backup strategies. RAID and snapshots? Not good enough. Alone, that is. A properly configured Syncthing makes sure my music exists on many different devices. And somewhere else there might still be an offline backup or two. I hope. How about photos? I don’t really take any. If there’s one medium I never really cared about, it’s photos. Incidentally, if my wife and I had to show proof of our relationship…good luck! To both of us.
So what’s the lesson learned? Not sure yet. In the meantime, however, I have replaced the damaged drives, (properly) rebuilt my NAS, and set up and configured a Postfix server to keep me informed in case anything needs immediate attention. I’ve sent a test email. Everything’s up and running. Good. I guess all that’s left to do now is not to ignore these “important” emails. Then again, I’m not even sure whether I still care about my music collection in ten years from now…