Sunday morning around 9am, the hard drive in the JoshChristie.com Linux server (named Bruce) started shorting out and causing the system to power off at random intervals -- often as short as a few seconds after powering on. At this point I was more annoyed than worried because I have a backup server (Felix) that runs BackupPC and backs up all my other machines daily. I figured I would just restore Saturday night's backup onto a new hard drive.

It was when I tried to login to Felix and realized the machine wasn't running that I started to be concerned. Felix booted up fine, but it had apparently been off and not backing up anything for eight days! At this point, I was moderately worried that I had permanently lost the past eight days of data.

Then around 10:30am, the statistically improbable happened - the backup server's hard drive crashed and took with it every shred of backup data I had for any of my machines. This is when panic set in and computer geek adrenaline started coursing through my veins. I immediately started burning DVDs to backup my documents, source code, and photos. I figured if two different server's hard drives had already crashed, my desktop might be next.

Determined not to lose any data despite the loss of my Linux server and my backup server, I began an extremely time-consuming process of starting Bruce and dumping as much data as possible to another computer before the hard drive shorted out and shut the machine off. In fact, two days later I'm still occasionally starting Bruce to grab some file I forgot to copy.

So anyway, it's been an interesting few days of recovering data and setting up a new Linux server named Marvin. If you're reading this, the new server is working... and if you're not reading this, then I guess I'm talking to myself when I should be fixing the new server.

I'm using Microsoft Virtual Server 2005 for this new server. Given that I don't get a tremendous amount of load on my sites, I think Virtual Server should make it easier for me to manage things and it'll allow me to consolidate everything on a single, modern, reliable machine. Since I moved from an old 400MHz Pentium II to a virtual server on an Athlon XP 2600, JoshChristie.com actually got a performance boost despite the inefficiency of using Virtual Server.

I'm planning to post some more details about my new server setup along with some tips for getting Fedora Core 3 working in Virtual Server 2005. I'll also be looking for a more reliable backup process since obviously mine failed me this time around.