Boss, I think it’s time to upgrade the hard drive.
I have all my websites located at one ISP (Internet Service Provider) located in Columbus Ohio. Well, that is where the server farm is located and main offices. I understand they have support people working all over the world. That’s one nice thing about working with an ISP.
However it is not so good when a huge chunk of your servers crash their hard drives all at the same time. That requires some hands on repair work. But then only so many people can work on hardware at the same time.
So that is what happened last week end. almost all the servers running their SQL (MySQL) databases and their email systems crashed (failed) at the same tine. No reason given yet if it was mechanical, electrical sabotage,or whatever.
The result was my email was down for about 2 days and all my web sites (which are all using databases) were down for about 5 days. Worst was my eCommerce store as definitely no one could buy stuff during that time. The good news is they are all running again and about a day earlier than expected. So far I have not seen any lost data corrupting my websites.
Server farms all use a form of protection called RAID arrays for the data. I wont go into detail as there is a link in the previous sentence. When too many drives fail they shut down to protect the data. Actually they keep running but stop all access. That preserves the backed up data from further damage. So saving that data on a drive by drive basis is rather laborious. SO for me after the long wait it has seemed to work.
You can just imagine all the furious users I picture storming Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory with pitchforks and torches burning. I am not that angered. I just hope they have a better plan for data preservation and restart.