You might have noticed that I’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front recently. Well, it all comes down to computers - you see, like cars they go wrong and, like cars, there is never a good time for it to happen.

I had a week off over half term. Feeling relaxed and full of good intentions on Monday morning I set about sorting out a few things on the server, something that had been on the ‘to do’ list for a while. As usual all data is safely backed up to another disk, so I confidently set about the job. Next thing I know and a message pops up informing me that one of the hard drives is failing. Still, that’s no problem we’ve got a mirrored RAID array (which means that there are two disks in the computer that acts as a server, both holding identical copies of everything, including the operating system).

But…I had forgotten about the law of sod, which decided to choose that moment to come into play (and he even had one more trick up his sleeve!). To cut a long story short everything on the server was lost - but remember the data was all backed up safely on yet another disk so there was still a get-out clause. Quantock Online is safely tucked away on an Internet server, so that was quite safe - but several years worth of family photos, correspondence etc. I do not want to lose.

Wait two days for new disks to arrive. Put disks in computer. Re-install operating system. Replace data on system from backup files. Sort out connections to other computers (thanks Chaff, the help was really appreciated - especially as it went on into the small hours!). Everything back to normal. Well, not quite. You see the server also has other software on it that is used for testing out the web site - which means (if you’re really that interested), Apache, PHP and MySQL still has to be re-configured to how I’d set it up before. Ho,hum, there go a few more hours…

Sod. Remember him? Well the sting in his tail was this. My other job that week was to talk myself into parting with cash for some clever software that could have saved hours of work in re-configuring everything in the event of serious failure…

Still, looking on the bright side, at least all the data was safe. I hope your data is. Maybe that should be the subject of another posting.