We now return to regular programming...

Over the weekend, the hard drive in the server most of my life is on died.  Well, about 1% of the data on the system is readable.  Amazingly, it's pretty much the most important 1%.

I have somewhat up-to-date backups (I was once a middling-good sysadmin, after all).  Backups that I haven't restored from, mostly because I've come to realise that I just don't care about that content anymore.  It's rather freeing, actually.

The hosting company I lease the server from replaced the drive and reinstalled on that drive (Goodbye Debian stale, Hello Ubuntu Dapper Drake with LTS).

The things that I thought I'd miss that I've found I haven't is my email.  Oh, I'll grab a copy of my aliases file for the people I want to keep in contact with, but the exact emails aren't all that important.  And, anyway, I'd already moved my mail life over to Google Mail (I'll write something up about Google Apps For Your Domain someday).

I recovered my 4.0.24 MySQL tables for gibe (the blogging engine for TurboGears I'm working on and this runs on), and for engal (the photo gallery for TurboGears I wrote).  I installed 4.0.24 (not a simple task via package management with Dapper, so I resorted to a custom install), discovered only the "visit" tables were broken, exported, and installed on package-managed MySQL 5 (on my way to PostgreSQL, of course).

I recovered my SVN repository from the disk itself, which contains my web site and all the code for gibe and engal.  The static resource content (mostly images of Dante linked to from my posts) was also all fine.

/etc was toast (Input/Output error if you tried to change working directory to it), which meant my exim and name server configuration and zones weren't recoverable from the drive.  But since I'd moved to Google Mail, everything was simplified, and I added back the backup MXs I run for friends.  The name server configuration was basically duplicated on another server, and that was about five minutes of work.

The backups are still useful - they're the "archive" of stuff I once thought was interesting.  I'll eventually get it whittled down to what I care about, and get it down locally (which may not make sense if you don't realise how bad Internet connectivity in South Africa is), and archive it here.

And, of course, if I never had the backups, I would almost certainly have not been lucky enough to be able to recover without using them.

(And, of course, this post will almost certainly cause people to notice that everything isn't perfectly put back together - but then, I'm counting on that so that I can find out about it... )