Having a cup while the operating system is being restored on the system that failed yesterday...

Yet another group of folks is scheduled to come out today and gaze at the bubbling brook outside my store and figure out if there's anything they can do about it. The first guys, at great expense - are going to run a series of high-tech tests to figure out where to dig.  The second group might actually start the excavation.

I looked at the dysfunctional hard drive. Western Digital. Gak... Let me tell you something. I've got a drawer full of old hard drives. Some of them go back twenty years. Every single Western Digital drive I've ever owned has failed,  and almost always have failed spectacularly. Most every other drive I've still got, and I can still access them given the right hardware. Draw your own conclusions.

2:00 PM

The operating system has been reloaded. Restored my most critical applications first. First things first... the printer drivers and the web browser. Then use the browser to grab the backups. The rental accounts recovered flawlessly. Then I open my financial account data. The most recent date on record is 2003. Ouch. Two years of lost data. Including this year. But I just backed up this two days ago. How could that be? Perhaps I loaded the wrong backup. I scanned the server directories. There's a problem... I have two versions of the backup on the Unix box. In one, the file extension is lower case. The other is upper case. And it was created two days ago. So I reloaded with the upper case version of the file.

The newest date is still 2003. Now I'm starting to sweat. My finances for the entire year - I don't seem to have them on backup. I check the other server. There's a file from Jan-2005. OK - let me try that one. I'll at least have a little more data than I do now. But I think the bank will only let you download three months into the past. I've still got a big problem. Doesn't look like there's any way to recover most of this year. I'm really sweating now. So I load the file from January. The newest date is still 2003. You'd think I'd be sweating buckets, wouldn't you? But no. Now I breathe a sigh of relief.

You see, I've used that particular backup before (the one from January). I know that it contains more recent information than 2003. The program migrated the data on the first file I used, and stored it somewhere else. It didn't even look at the two other backups I loaded.

So I deleted all the data from the program, and started fresh with the uppercase file from two day's ago. Bingo. Everything is there. Sync with the bank and everything is hunky-dory.

They found the leak. I've got jackhammers going 30 feet from me right now. Should be fixed in another hour. Glad it was outside the store...