Well, I had my first real disaster today. Last night really. Looks like at about 5AM I lost 2 drives in my RAID5 that was storing not only all the emails for my corpus, but also all of my Erlang code. I lost it all.
I do have some backups of the code, but they are more then two weeks old. Backups are not my forte and unfortunately this will not make me very much better at backups.
The reason for the failure is that I do not have all of my production hardware yet and that means I have been working on what I have lying around. Of course what I have lying around is a variable treasure trove for most people, but it is still prone to failures.
So now I have to recreate two weeks worth of code and I’m going to redesign parts of my database. I was going a bit over board with the third form normalization and I need to move back to second form normalization in a few areas for performance reasons.
I suspect that the system will be down for at least two days, one for the hardware and at least one for the code and databases. I’ll see what I can do about doing both at once, but I don’t have any of my personal email till the system is back up and running … So two days is a really long time 