On Sunday I went for a motorcycle ride. Not that this has anything to do with the subject...
When I returned home and tried to open a file using Excel on my computer, I got a "File not found" error. I know the file is there - I had just edited it a few days before. The file is on a network drive on a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device. I checked, and sure enough, that drive showed as not connected...
My NAS is a smart piece of hardware, specifically a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+, that runs a flavor of Unix and contains up to four hard disk drives (mine has three 1.5 Terabyte disk drives) in a RAID array for redundancy. Failure of any one disk drive will result in no loss of data. Additionally, I have a couple of USB drives connected to the NAS, and every night while I sleep, it backs up all new and changed data to these drives. I periodically swap one of the drives out and store it "offsite" in case of disaster, like fire or theft, so I have a copy of my data that's not in my computer room.
I crawled under the computer table, and found the NAS completely dark. And it didn't want to power up. Unplugging it and plugging it back in got it to where it would power up. Whew - must have been a power hit that knocked it out, I thought (although it's plugged into a UPS, so that doesn't really seem likely). A few minutes later I came back, and found it working its way through the file system check. However, there was this faint unmistakable smell of hot electronics in the air. I touched the NAS, and it was very warm to the touch - unusual, as this unit normally runs cool. And the hot electronics odor was very strong around it. Figuring I was watching a catastrophic failure getting ready to occur, I pulled the plug. Then got down and used my nose to isolate the failure area.
The smell was clearly coming from the NAS, around the power supply. I pulled the disk drives out of it, checked the fans and vacuumed the dust out. It was dusty, but not bad enough to stop the airflow. To cut to the chase about the NAS, I found out I had a five-year warranty on it, and I purchased it just a bit over four years ago. 45 minutes on the phone with Netgear on Monday arranged a replacement, which is on its way to me.
But, back to editing my file. I now have around 2 Terabytes of data that is inaccessible. :-( That's "2" with 12 zeroes after it. 2,000,000,000,000 bytes. That's a lot of missing data. But remember I said that the NAS automatically backed up to a couple of USB drives every night? And I haven't touched this file for a couple of days. The backup should be current. I plugged one of the backup drives (they're formatted as Windows disks) into my computer, and copied that file from the backup drive to my C drive, and was able to edit it with no hassle. Hurray for backups. Now I only need to remember to put that file back where it's supposed to be when I get my NAS back up and running...
Hurray for backups! Did I already say that? Double Hurray for backups that actually work!!
