Do your Backups!
Here we go again.. Another backup horror story to remind you all to do your backups.
Now, you would think that as many times as I have revisited this topic, that *I* would be backup master and that I would never have an incident where I couldn’t retrieve something in a catastrophe. Well, that simply isn’t the case, unfortunately..
To be fair, there are a few things I just don’t have backed up. Mostly due to space limitations, some due to the ease of restoration without backups, a couple due to apathy and procrastination. The later is what just bit me.
My music collection sat (note the post tense) on an external usb hard drive. My music folder was some 14+ gb, which is partially why I didn’t back it up very often. It’s just a daunting task, and backing things up over a mostly wireless infrastructure is a pain to begin with. Well, all that left me in the situation I am in now where my external hard drive containing my music collection on it died with no warning. Now luckilly enough, I tried to get a complete backup of that stuff a few weeks ago. The problem is that I backed it up to my NAS, which although it actually runs Linux, shares files via smb, which for some reason didn’t like all my weird filenames. Consequently, some of my music files were not backed up. Not very many, but some. The other problem is that I have downloaded some music from Amazon’s music service, and none of that was backed up.
So, I have a bit of work to do as far as recovery now. I bought another external usb hdd enclosure hoping that that was my problem. It wasn’t. Not only was my old usb enclosure dead, so was the hdd 🙁 So, I put another hdd in my new and working enclosure and I have to start getting the music back where it belongs. This means restoring what I have to the new hdd and trying to figure out what I am missing. Luckily enough I just happened to find my original copy of the music I bought from Amazon a few minutes ago 🙂
The bad part about this is I now realize I have all this stuff backed up on my 500gb NAS, but my NAS isn’t backed up anywhere at all. 🙁