Terrell was concerned that the weather had caused enough disruption with local communications that he has so far been unable to call or email everyone scheduled to attend the conference, and hasn’t been able to get his internet access to work long enough to update the MinistryTECH website with an announcement, and hoped that putting the word out through blogs would be enough to alert everyone.

Hopefully the airlines and hotels will be understanding of the situation created by the weather and refund people’s tickets and reservations, or it may be difficult to afford travel when the events are rescheduled. Unfortunately, airlines are known for making up reasons for not giving refunds in such circumstances, but we’ll see how it turns out in this situation. An alternate idea might be to contact the government and see if they can assist with disaster relief funds, although this might be limited to people attending from organizations without any religious affiliation.

I was really looking forward to attending these events this week, but I guess there’s always the Roundtable this fall to look forward to…as long as there aren’t any hurricanes in the Carolinas this October!

So I restarted the computer, which by that time was finished running software updates and demanding as much anyway. Logged in, and didn’t do anything else other than run DiskWarrior this time. Same process, but this time after it finished the option to Replace the repaired directory structure was available! Click, wait ten-or-so minutes. Ta-da! It works! Nothing like the good ‘ole “reboot” Windows trick to get a Mac fixed!

I grabbed some nice screenshots of DiskWarrior in action (thanks to some quick Googling to determine how to use the built-in screen shot capture feature I knew existed on the Mac — Command+Shift+4, Spacebar, click on window to capture), so I thought I’d give you a sneak peek, in case you want to get your geek on vicariously without going through the near-data-loss experience yourself!

Thanks to the commenters from my last post with suggestions, they were helpful to my sanity over the weekend since I knew I had some good alternate options if DiskWarrior failed! I could find plenty of options on my own, but it’s difficult to sort out the wheat from the chaff without spending a lot of money trying various things, so the recommendations are very much appreciated.

Who needs backup?

Yep, we do! I mentioned in my last post that this server wasn’t originally intended for critical data storage(just temporary video where the RAID 5 redundancy was plenty of backup), but over time with staff turnover and other random happenings, it has sort of become much more critical. Several years ago, backing up the 1.6TB of data on this server was cost-prohibitive. Now? 1TB hard drives are $300 each, and even nice things like the Drobo are $500, which will hold up to 4 of those drives and give 2.7TB of usable data storage for right at about $1700. Or, since the array is 1.5TB, put three 1TB drives in for $1400 and get 1.8TB usable space, which is still 0.2TB ahead of our needs for a mirrored backup.

Is this the best backup solution? I know there are less expensive NAS enclosures out there, some possibly directly-networkable and not just USB 2.0 like the Drobo is currently. Right now our internal data server (RAID 5 array) is being mirrored by another server with another RAID 5 array. We have 1TB of storage and backup between those two servers, but a third backup would be nice to have. What about maxing out a Drobo and backing everything up to it? What about other options? What about picking up an iSCSI SAN from StoreVault for $3k with 1TB, or expanding that a bit and put all our main storage there (including several virtual server hard drives) , and using the existing arrays we have for backups? Lots of questions to answer, and this almost-data-loss is a useful catalyst to demonstrate the need to spend money for backups. And by “useful catalyst” I mean, I have been asked to make sure this can’t happen again :-)

I know similar things have been a hot topic of discussion on the Church IT Podcast and in other similar forums lately, but if anyone has specific information or suggestions, you can make a blogger happy with the comments form :-D Oh yeah, and sorry about that corny title. I couldn’t resist. It’s so much fun to make my wife roll her eyes when I make weird word plays like “HurRAID!” I imagine most of you rolled yours right along with her…

This is a 1.6TB array, around since our previous Evangelism and Media pastor who did quite a bit of video editing and used the array for video storage while working on projects. Fast forward to today, when the Marketing/Communications (MarCom) department is using the system to store–everything. However, we don’t have a backup solution in place because the system wasn’t intended initially as mission-critical storage and the budget hasn’t been there to change that. 1.6TB is the largest amount of storage in one server that we have right now, so there’s no place to even copy the data for a backup, like we do with our primary file server.

I purchased DiskWarrior, which comes highly recommended, but it’s throwing a funky error about a corrupt configuration file when I try to even start it. It says to delete the old configuration file to continue, but it doesn’t exist–thus, a support request has been logged and we wait until Monday to continue the saga (I tried calling their support number but they had just closed for the weekend. Probably for the best, it was dinner time, and family time, and homework time! I didn’t get out of there until 7 pm anyway). Meanwhile we are faced with the prospect that if this doesn’t work, the only option I can think of is to ring up one of those fun services that do awesome data recovery at a price on par with their awesomeness. The array itself says it’s fine, no lost drives or anything weird like you would expect for a failed system, it appears that the partition just got corrupted somehow when the power was unceremoniously yanked. To protect the guilty, I’ll spare you the details of who and why, but let’s just say my happiness level is not quite up where I like it to be…

If you have any recommendations of good (and preferably inexpensive) RAID5, Mac filesystem recovery services, I’m open to suggestions if we end up having to go that way (and can justify the cost given the data). I will update you next week on the progress with DiskWarrior when it gets up and running.

The news is tragic, but there’s always been a passion sparked in me when I hear of people stepping up and using technology in heroic efforts to assist with emergency situations. Ranging from listening in to the Amateur (Ham) Radio “severe weather net” on my handheld ham radio during thunderstorms, hailstorms, and tornadoes to the scramble to get everything in place for to handle a high-volume website in real time for something like this, it causes an itch I haven’t been able to personally scratch, but I enjoy living through the experiences vicariously. Part of me wonders if someday I’ll be in the wrong place at the right time to lend a hand — something that both excites and terrifies me. Fortunately, as Christians if we take a step back, we should realize that even in a high-stress situation, whether it’s our life in danger or someone else’s, God is in control and all we can do is the best we can do. Keep up the good work in all its forms. And at the least, pray for Kelsey Smith’s family, friends and community in the meantime.