對檔案備份不當一回事的朋友，強力建議看一下這一篇 : Hard disk death
沒錯，這是在 http://www.pureftpd.org/ 的網站的 index 文件，Frank 老兄的硬碟掛了，而他恰巧又在之前幾天，拿著本來用來備份的硬碟作其它的用途，所以導致了悲劇的發生，對於一個資訊工作者來說，整整五年的資料毀於一旦，文件、信件、原始碼，因為我們提暢無紙環境，所有的東西都在那裡頭，這是一件多可怕的事呀。
我在年前剛好也掛掉了一顆硬碟，不過裡頭剛好是些 crap “like mp3 or movies” 跟一些原始檔與信件的備分，雖然沒有特別重要的資料，但不能說不會痛，這得多花上幾個鐘頭的時間把資料重新備分，重新弄一個硬碟來做也是挺累人的。
不備份或少備份的朋友，希望看了這一篇能對你有所幫助。
為免該文在此事件後移除，轉錄如下:
From: http://www.pureftpd.org/
By: Frank Denis “Jedi/Sector One”
Hard disk death
Thanks a million to the following individuals and companies for their donation that should really help to recover the data.
People from that list: if you want a link to your web site, a banner, or anything else, just ask and I’d be glad to add it. Your name will also be included in all my future open-source software.
Jan 31, 2006
This server’s hard disk is dead. Nothing can be read any more from it, and it keeps doing odd clicks. I tried almost everything to recover it today, and the heads keep clicking without reading any data.
For the record, the hard disk was a 40 Gb Seagate Momentus. I bought it 1.5 years ago. The SMART status was always okay, without any error. But last morning, that drive killed itself.
I used to backup the data from that server every week, on another host. But last week, I needed some space for a specific application. And I temporarely deleted the backup. 2 days later, the disk died. And that host was always backuped for 5 years before. Call it Murphy’s law or voodoo, but it really, really, really sucks.
I tried almost every trick found on internet, including putting it in the freezer in a ziplock. No change. The BIOS doesn’t see it any more.
The death of that hard disk has a lot of implications. I’ve lost almost all my work from the last 5 years. I’ve lost all my unreleased source code. I’ve lost all my documentation. I’ve lost critical private and professionnal mails. I’ve lost ssh keys, passwords, license numbers, etc.
All web sites that used to be hosted here are lost. The work for the upcoming new versions of ucarp, sharedance and pure-ftpd is lost. The manucure-pro.com web site is no more, and the customer database is lost as well. 00f.net is obviously dead with the rest, the data is lost with the code. I have no way to recover the subscribers list of mailing-lists like pureftpd’s and ucarp’s ones.
There were things that can be made again (from scratch sigh). But other things were unique and they can’t be made again nor recovered.
The content of that hard disk was really critical for me. I couldn’t even do my daily job without peeking at code snippets that were made, tested and stored on that host.
This is like a bullet in my head. I feel as lost as the data. This server didn’t contain crap like mp3 or movies. It contained files I can’t work without. I already experienced some hard disk crashes, but none was as important as that one. Jedi/Sector One was that hard disk.
I’m gonna call a data recovery company, but this kind of service is usually very expensive, I probably can’t afford it.
The hard disk was replaced with another one and a raw operating system. I just rebuilt basic services like DNS and email.
Thank you for coming and for reading this text. You can probably delete the orphan address from your bookmarks now. And thank you Seagate.
-Frank.
Feb 1
The FTP server is partially back. The pure-ftpd mirrors were mirrored and some other files were grabbed from other web sites.
The system is now running Lighttpd instead of Apache. Since I have to restart from scratch, why not.
I had to build an OpenBSD port of PHP with FastCGI in order to have PHP work with Lighttpd. Looks fine so far.
Based upon old bug reports, I also reconstructed two popular patches for OpenBSD. Get a jumbo patch for OpenBSD 3.9 here: new disk scheduler + signal logger.
It looks like recovering the data from a hard disk would cost between 500 € and 2000 €. If you have any data recovery company to recommend, I’d be glad to listen to any suggestion.
Feb 2
Some very nice people suggested a call for donations for the data recovery. A Paypal link has been added to the top of that page.
I’m planning to create a basic CMS in order to create emergency web pages for the lost web sites of my various open-source projects: pure-ftpd, ucarp, sharedance, skycache, sharpcrawler, etc.
The CMS will probably be designed with Ruby on Rails since I’m playing a lot with Ruby lately. My little server (Soekris Net4801) is now smoothly running Lighttpd, PHP5, Eaccelerator (+patches), and Ruby (+Rails) on OpenBSD 3.9. If you need help to get a similar setup, I’d be glad to help you. 34 Mb of free memory should be enough for everything. If not, my contribution to PHP and Ruby will be to spend some time on the interpreters code in order to reduce their memory needs.
