…. and you always learn the lesson the hard way.

Point 1:  The electricity supply in Hong Kong village houses is somewhat antiquated.  Any time there’s a thunder storm and lightning comes down out of the sky somewhere in the immediate vicinity, the main circuit breaker pops and my house loses all electricity.  The circuit breaker is outside the house and of course it only needs to be reset when the rain is coming down in buckets.  For various reasons, it’s not always possible for me to shut my computer down when a storm is coming and I know this could happen.  Or I suppose I could bring in some electrical contractor to redo the wiring or to modernize this stuff.  Except that I only rent the joint and I expect to be gone next year and I know my landlord wouldn’t pay for it.

Point 2:  I keep my important data on RAID 1 drives – two identical drives, one mirroring the other.  One drive fails, the other is okay and you don’t lose anything.  Or so you are told.

So, thunder storm.  Power goes out.  Power gets switched back on and one of my RAID boxes, 750 gig X 2 drives by Buffalo, indicates that drive 1 ain’t doing so well.  I switch off the box, switch it back on and it starts rebuilding drive 1.  A few hours later, it all seems good.  Except it wasn’t.

Some of the files are missing.  And some are now just 0 bytes.  I keep two kinds of data on this drive – my iTunes collection and all of my photos.  I start going through iTunes – I start at “A,” checking every file to see which ones are gone and which ones are still there but are now “nothing.”   Of course I can’t finish this in one sitting because I have almost 45,000 songs sitting in iTunes.  And when I come back the next day, some of the files that were okay the day before are now also screwed.  Some of the files that I re-added the day before are gone again.

The problem would seem to be that the power surge (and yes, I do have this plugged into a surge protector, albeit a cheap one) has damaged the drive controller.  Which then screws up the directories and file systems.  And the files are fucked.

I got a new RAID box, copied over everything copy-able from the old drive.  I’ll smash open the Buffalo box, rescue the two hard disks (which I can reformat and reuse) and toss the box.

The iTunes stuff can all be restored – it’s just really freaking time consuming.

The photos?  Actually, I’m too scared to look right now.  I don’t want to think about what might have been lost – and 95% of them can’t be recovered if they’re gone.

So, now … back-ups on two separate physical devices?  Off-site storage?  Seems like “the cloud” is a possible answer but since I’m talking at least 100 gig here, I don’t know if there’s any solution that falls within my meager budget.  Suggestions?  Recommendations?

Sigh.

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