A few weeks ago there was a heat event in the facility I host my server at where cabinet temps approached 145°F. This greatly decreases the life of moving parts, specifically hard drives. I have been busy taking care of other customer equipment and hoping for the best with the server that runs MitsuStyle.com as it has been rock solid with 1300+ days of uptime.
I also have been making plans to move it and well, the day I leave for a week vacation in Vegas my plans came to fruition
HDD failure ~01:00 on Monday morning 7/2/2012. This is a trip to celebrate my wife Anna's bday so you can imagine how excited she's been with me trying to repair it from thousands of miles away.
After verifying that my off-site backup scheme appeared to be working (data dated 00:00 Sunday 7/1), I spun up a virtual server on Atomic Data's local private cloud offering (extra-special thank-you plug:
http://www.atomicdata.com ). So we now are hosted on redundant VMware servers, five shelves of redundant disk (and all those spindles for lots of speed!) via a NetApp SAN, redundant access-switch fabric and are attached to one of the most bad-ass networks available!
Next came the process of restoring data. Had I been in MN this could have gone much quicker, but I did what I could with what I had available. So I initially restored the database dump dated 6/30 when restoring the site and well, if you were here 24 hours ago you saw the result--everything from about May 31 on was gone. No sweet house pics from Brandon, no epic Proving Grounds battle threads, and no dick-wagging pics by dsm_421. Sigh.
So I began restoring the raw database files from that 7/1 backup and this morning at about 11:45 I hit the go button and swapped it in place of our month-old setup....A few tweaks, repairs, and optimizations and we are looking good!
Enjoy the site, please let me know if there are any issues (post here or contact me directly) AND if you have Anna's phone number or email address, send her a txt thanking her for letting me interrupt her birtyday trip!