Server Outage - Why you should backup.

For those who wonder why I harp about making backups this blog will explain why.

Today I had the harddrive in the file/printer server fail. The machine has been acting up, but, I put it down to Windows. I tried to install various flavours of Linux, but, it kept locking up or generating weird errors. I finally got into partitioning the drive and told it to do a format and thorough check and it told me it had an unrecoverable error. Fortunately I made a backup last week so I lost nothing.

This is a great object lesson on why I keep telling everyone to do a regular backup. I am lucky in that I had an old 6 gig drive and I am now in the process of putting Windows back on. For some reason the hardware is too old for the latest distros and I am not putting up a huge fight. I will put Windows back on and a basic firewall. I may end up making a present to a family member of the machine. It is still an excellent basic entry level machine.

And for those who are curious, yes it is a legit license. I have a legit registered copy of Windows 98. I also have three copies of Windows 95 for the other machines in the house that are still on Windows. I also have legit licensed copies of Winzip, Zonealarm, McAfee. People, don't pirate software!