Well, it's been a while since I've updated ye olde blog, summoning up the motivation and thinking of interesting topics for a blog on a regular basis is pretty hard.  I have no idea how folks like Jeff Atwood and Scott Hanselman blog so much!

One important issue I wanted to bring up today though is the importance of backing up your data.  I keep all my important data on my home file server within a hardware RAID5 array composed of a Promise RAID card and four 250gb hard drives.  Well one day the card decided to stop recognizing one of my drives.  Ok, no big deal, I actually keep a spare drive around specifically for rebuilding this RAID5 array in case catastrophe ever strikes.  After I swapped the offending drive out with the spare drive, the card decides to not recognize TWO of the drives.

Uh oh... there's no way to rebuild a RAID5 array if more than 1 drive decides to go bad.  After a few days of fiddling around with the card and drives in different configurations and different motherboards, I finally give up and accept the fact I lost all my data :(   The good news is I discover that my spare drive actually contained a half year old copy of the data I lost (I had used it to temporarily store my data when I expanded the RAID array from 3 drives to 4).  The bad news is I lost all of my newborn baby son's pictures that I had taken in his first few weeks of life.

So let this be a lesson to the faithful reader (all 2 of you!).  No matter how reliable you think your storage medium is, MAKE A BACKUP!  I've now dumped the RAID5 array and just use backup software that syncs all my important data to a separate physical drive on a nightly basis.