A little thing did get me.

It's been a while since I updated, which generally means there's a lot going on. Yeah, we're busy, makes the days go by faster :-).Anyway, we lost a NAS device a week or two ago. It was ugly. You see, I asked Lori "Is everything on the network being backed up?" Her answer was "Yes, it's all going to backup." She's like the sys admin, and I'm like the storage admin, so this was cool.

Except I was thinking about the backup machine when I asked that. You see, like most environments we found a device that was easy to get access to and had a lot of space on it - at least a lot of space where word docs and PDFs are concerned. So we used it.

Unfortunately, it was not in the backup system because that was our backup device. And it died. On my birthday no less.

Yeah yeah, laugh at me for using a backup device as primary storage, laugh at me for using a consumer grade NAS device in a mission-critical situation (all of Lori and I's test results and all of our writing, both freelance and for CMP were on there), but it's happening in your enterprise too, and it grew in your environment the same way it did for us. Slowly and nefariously.

In the end most of it was backed up somewhere. Her book for O'Reilly was in her sent mail, our book for another publisher was in my sent mail, etc. We only lost about a weeks worth of work each, and that on freelance stuff. But it was scary.

Infrant Technologies was nice enough to come to our rescue and let us keep one of their ReadyNAS devices we had laying around the lab. That's good news because ReadyNAS is RAIDed, so no fears about the single drive dying and taking things with it.

And while we were at it, I reconfigured the storage so that the machine named "backup" was only used for backups, and all direct storage on that network goes to the Infrant.

It's the little things - like a little consumer grade NAS with a single disk that can die, or miscommunications between admins - that can get you.

Beware, it's scary out there.

Next time we'll chat about the progress I'm making (and not making) on the "Build your own NAS" project. It's moving along, I may even post pictures.

Oh Yeah, and Happy New Year!Until then,Don.