WE'VE LOST EVERYTHING!!!!

Well, maybe not...

So we come back from vacation on Saturday only to discover that my home server had crashed worse than an epileptic driving a robin reliant. I had a RAID 0 array setup for performance (two hard drives, striped data, half goes to one drive, half to the other) into a 500GB combined drive - one of the drives failed thereby losing all of my data. Arrogance flowing freely, I never bothered to back up the data so had a minor break down of "WE LOST EVERYTHING!!!!!" for a few minutes. I come back from vacation and find the system trying to restart but failing with the drives clicking away like an obsessive compulsive with a new clicky-pen.

When I'd finished, I spent some time researching data recovery services and started getting a few quotes on how much it would cost to retrieve the data. First one I get back - $2,000 starting range. SWEET JESUS! Second quote, between $2,500 and $6,000. F*%! ME GENTLY WITH A CHAINSAW! Now, I understand that these companies are used to dealing with corporations with data loss whose data is more valuable than $6,000 but come on...

Ranting aside, I thought about it some more (meaning, I found a dark corner to cry in) and came up with a possible solution. Still need to buy at least one more drive (because you know, I'm made of money), but by taking the PCB from the broken drive and replacing it with the PCB from the working drive, I am able to access the data. A little more online research yields a nice piece of software that lets you image your drives and stitch them back together into a unified drive image that you can then pull the data from. Total cost: LESS THAN 6 F&$@ING GRAND!

Phew! Deep breath...

So, now I need to get a new drive... preferably one around 500GB, so I'm looking around for deals if anyone knows of any...

Vacation was good though! I'll post an entry and pictures shortly. In the meantime, here's a video with an animated baby in it...because... it's Tuesday...