msqr.us: Death, and Resurrection

Minette and I ran off into the bear-infested wilds of Kings Canyon last week, and although we made it safely (but did have close encounters of the bear kind!) the morning after we returned I got up only to notice a strange sound, not unlike a bear snorting, coming from the office.

It was not a bear, of course, but the hard drive of msqr.us had failed. Thus began 5 days of techie hell, trying to rescue the data off the little bastard 300,000-hour (35 years) rated drive. Bryan, I think you cursed the drive with your ominous warnings about laptop drive failure.

Backups?

Of course!

Well.... OK, they were almost exactly a month old. Not good there. I need to get the data off that thing. All my mail goes there... at least, all the mail I read.

I ordered a replacement drive online, no local stores had one in stock. It wouldn't come for 3 days, however, because it was Saturday and the retailer wouldn't ship until Monday. I even paid the $35 for overnight express.

I started hunting around for some service to extract the data off the drive. Turns out such services exist in abundance in the Bay area. Also turns out the starting price is $1K, and quickly spirals out of control. There must be another way here.

I assailed a neighborhood friend who might be able to help. He was in the middle of moving apartments, but he killed a few hours trying to get at that data... only to nearly fry his own computer. We stopped and went out for a burrito.

Stuffed and docile now, I returned home empty handed. I thought I'd give it one more shot... so I booted up off a CD and tried to get to the drive. No luck. Once more: no luck. Once more: what's this? Partial luck!

And so I began to extract the damn data off the drive. This took all of 10 hours or so, the drive, poor little thing, was very wounded but kept on trying even when it failed. Slowly but surely, I was able to get all important data off the drive.

Tuesday arrives, and the replacement drive arrived as planned. I had also worked out a new backup strategy that involved purchasing a new external drive to mirror the server to each night, and that drive arrived as well. I was all set to resurrect msqr.us. I thought during the process, why not do a little updating of the software while I'm already in there? Sure, what the hell. Dumped some change for a new version of RedHat Linux, installed that, and started rebuilding the system piece by piece.

Well, msqr.us is back now, and nearly everything is restored. Not only restored, but upgraded and dusted off and spruced up all around. Hopefully that new drive will last longer than it's predecessor's record of 18,000 hours. Since msqr.us died and now lives, doesn't that mean it's paid for its sins?