I'm Back!!!

A few weeks ago, I bought a new server, as my old one had troubles with the heat. Whenever the temperature got beyond 25 degrees celsius, it would reboot. Not very reliable for a server....

So, I spent quite some time installing Windows, a database server, my websites, FTP access and so on. After a while, everything worked exactly as I wanted, so I made an image of the machine. The final step was to add the hard drive from my old server in my new server, so it could serve as a mirror disk. Adding the disk was a breeze and after a few minutes my new machine was up and running again. I went into the Disk Manager and deleted all the partitions from my old disk. Or so I thought....

It turned out when booting the machine, my old disk was seen as the primary disk, so I actually booted into my old Windows Server installation, but on my new server. Since the layout of my disks was identical I didn't notice the difference. So effectively, I erased my new hard drive, with all the digital data on it that I have created in the past 10 to 12 years ... :-(

Backups and undelete tools to the rescue! I bought Active Undelete; a marvelous tool that was able to find all of my data on my erased disk. I do have backups of most of my stuff, but it's scattered throughout dozens of CD-ROMS and DVDs so I was really glad this tool was able to recover all my data. To make everything work, I plugged some additional machines into my network to hold all of the erased data while reinstalling my new machines. At a certain point, I had 4 heat generating machines in my office; not something you wish for during hot summer days....

Now, after days of recovery, backing up and reinstalling crucial software, everything is up and running again. My main server's disk is mirrored onto another disk to avoid problems in the future. I also deployed a rigid backup strategy, so hopefully I never have to go through this again.

My office is now cleaner, more quite and cooler than ever before....