Almost There!!
Thanks to Best Buy’s dirt cheap price on an external 1TB drive (although the price of dirt is often relative) I was able to add enough space back into the server last night to get all the data back on the shares. So I started the last 500GB of data copying this morning, and when I get home tonight it should be done. Then all I have to do is rebuild the iTunes library and put back all the customizations, and when the new drive and controller card show up Thursday I’ll add them in, which will give me lots more free space.
I do want to clear something up here, though, about the stability of WHS. I’ve been running WHS in one version or another since it was a Release Candidate, and upgraded to the final version as soon as I got my hands on it last fall, sometime around October. In all the time I’ve been running it, I haven’t had any major problems until now. Sure, I ran into the occasional bug, but hey, it’s a Microsoft product, that’s to be expected. Last weekend’s major crash has certainly been inconvenient, and taken a long time to recover, but I haven’t lost any data, and the majority of recovery time has been due to the fact that 3+ terrabytes of data takes a loooooong time to copy. Let me repeat that: EVEN WITH THIS CRASH, I HAVEN’T LOST ANY DATA. That, folks, is pretty impressive. Considering that this system has 3+TB of data, and had a massive crash and complete system rebuild, I am impressed.
Sure, it’s annoying, and inconvenient, but in the long run, I didn’t lose anything but time, I learned more about how WHS works, I was able to redesign the setup to reduce the risks of failure, and I have been reminded about the importance of backing up not just data but also the system partion. I will be spending part of next weekend installing and configuring DriveSnapshot so that the system drive of WHS is backed up regularly.
And just to note, I have been blaming the boot failure on a problem with removing drives from the storage array. Well, last night I removed those same two drives again, and all is well. This time I was smart and rebooted after removing each drive, so maybe that helped, or maybe there was just something wrong and it just happened to go all the way wrong when I shut down that time, with nothing to do with the drive removal at all. This is more likely, especially since I found about 40GB of data while recovering files that should have been completely deleted two days before the crash.