I was updating some ID3 tags on a few songs today when I got an error saving the new tag. The mounted file system to my music share had become read-only. I checked the exports file on my server. It was read-write. I checked my fstab. Everything looked good. I checked the file system itself on the server. Trouble. One of my drives had failed moments earlier. Luckily, the array was configured for RAID-5, so no data was lost, but it’s still going to take a long time to rebuild it.

Strangely enough, this is not the only drive failure I have had to deal with this holiday season. One of my good friends asked for some help with a laptop drive that had failed. She wasn’t worried initially, because she has an external drive she uses for backup. Curiously, it failed within a day of the laptop drive failure. She has a second external drive that she uses to back up the *really* important things… and it was giving her errors as well. She panicked. Luckily, that third drive was still functioning and we were able to retrieve her most important things.

It was one year ago today that my brother lost everything from his external drive. In his case, the drive was fine; he had accidentally re-partitioned the drive while trying to create a USB boot device to hack his AppleTV. He had his backup drive and his USB flash drive plugged in at the same time and chose the wrong one to hold the boot image. We were able to use TestDisk and PhotoRec from CGSecurity to recover the pictures he had just taken over Christmas. He may have been forgiven for almost losing the photos, but I don’t think he got permission to go ahead and install Boxee on his AppleTV.

I started using Mozy right about the same time. The home version is only $5/month and includes unlimited storage space. It’s not perfect, but it’s very easy to use. The home version doesn’t backup network drives, and I’m too cheap to pay for anything else… so I spent a few days rebuilding my file server with RAID-5 about the same time. As you can imagine, I’m very happy I did.