![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Zeta's Stories: Backups are Important!
Jan. 24th, 2024 08:13 pmSo a few years ago I had a small NAS, serving as my main filesystem for all sorts of video and audio contents, packages, etc... It contained a lot of personal photos, etc, that I really would have hated to lose, and so I always kept a backup... of at least some of it. I couldn't quite afford a large enough backup unit at the time, so there were some things that only existed there.
One day, I came home from work and my NAS was off. "That's odd," I thought, since it ran 24/7, and I proceeded to try the power button. Absolutely nothing. Not an LED or anything else at all. Well, this NAS had a slightly odd internal power supply that ran off an external 19V brick, so I decided that I'd worry about the rest of the system later and just pop the drives out of the front and hook them up to my media center PC to try and check if my data was at least intact.
Montage ensues, pulling the media PC apart and placing the drives (still in their hot-swap trays) upside-down on top of the media PC. I hook everything up, plug the PC back in, and hit the power button. INSTANTLY, A THREE INCH FLAME shoots out of the top of one of the drive's controller boards where the hot-swap tray had shorted to the drive! Apparently, over time, the metal bottom of the tray had bent and made contact, and while the dinky little 120W NAS PSU tripped out and saved anything bad from happening, the old 750W PSU in the media PC was happy to just power the fuck through that short. Needless to say, that drive was toast, but my data survived to live another day thanks to RAID5, and now I keep backups all over the place.
Notes on easy off-site backups:
1. Encrypted flash or hard drive in your car's glove box.
2. Encrypted flash or hard drive in your bank safety deposit box. (Two or three 3.5" drives fit perfectly in a 3x5 box, which runs about $100/year most everywhere.)
Obviously, you'll have to rotate them periodically, but that's a good start at least!
One day, I came home from work and my NAS was off. "That's odd," I thought, since it ran 24/7, and I proceeded to try the power button. Absolutely nothing. Not an LED or anything else at all. Well, this NAS had a slightly odd internal power supply that ran off an external 19V brick, so I decided that I'd worry about the rest of the system later and just pop the drives out of the front and hook them up to my media center PC to try and check if my data was at least intact.
Montage ensues, pulling the media PC apart and placing the drives (still in their hot-swap trays) upside-down on top of the media PC. I hook everything up, plug the PC back in, and hit the power button. INSTANTLY, A THREE INCH FLAME shoots out of the top of one of the drive's controller boards where the hot-swap tray had shorted to the drive! Apparently, over time, the metal bottom of the tray had bent and made contact, and while the dinky little 120W NAS PSU tripped out and saved anything bad from happening, the old 750W PSU in the media PC was happy to just power the fuck through that short. Needless to say, that drive was toast, but my data survived to live another day thanks to RAID5, and now I keep backups all over the place.
Notes on easy off-site backups:
1. Encrypted flash or hard drive in your car's glove box.
2. Encrypted flash or hard drive in your bank safety deposit box. (Two or three 3.5" drives fit perfectly in a 3x5 box, which runs about $100/year most everywhere.)
Obviously, you'll have to rotate them periodically, but that's a good start at least!
