What happened with Paul’s old computer?
Because I know you tune in just to hear me write about Windows boxes that went down. As you may recall I’ve been a little less active than usual the past few weeks because my main powerhorse of a computer ponied up and died. I suspected ransomware at first, but yeah we’ll get to it. Yes, I know it’s not powerhorse, I’m not a foal.
The TL;DR version of the above is Backblaze only stores data for 30 days on our account, it had been set to ignore the \user folder where conveniently everything I needed was, I blame corruption. Veeam I had was only storing a month or two of data and the problems happened months ago evidently, image level backup had corrupted data, all backups I had were pretty much toast.
Luckily I’d played around with Amazon Photos prior to the corruption, completely forgot about it. Recovered 212 gig of photos or so. What I didn’t realize at the time was that Amazon Photos had not backed up any of my wife’s photos.
Managed to get all that and the videos back in an epic feat of data recovery I’ll write about some time. I think we lost about 15 videos and no photos.
I built the new machine and got up and running on it and then was able to do offline data recovery, got what I needed, got the unit online enough to determine the file journal was corrupt and the system was writing garbage and being absurdly slow. It also wouldn’t boot about a third of the time at this point. This was new. I’d never had it not boot before. With or without the raid card in the system stopped posting BIOS like a lot.
Swapped video card, same, reseated everything, same. Removed all drives. Same. Removed an evidently malfunctioning USB3 card. Bam. System boots every time. Data on the RAID was corrupt and mostly unrecoverable but the system booted faster than I can recall it going in months. Windows barely operated. Had it on long enough to verify all files were transferred, do one final image level backup, and then tear the machine apart and put it back together to test it for problems.
At the moment the trust level is still absurdly low. This will go in as a backup server at work, and it will be running disk checks and memory checks for the next few weeks to rule out that there’s something else wrong with it. However, you don’t chuck dual-core 24 logical processor systems with 70+ gig of RAM to the curb if you don’t have to.
The idea is to make it a Hypervisor backup to a VMWare system we have (so when our VMWare system fails we just move on and do the streaming restore using Veeam) or perhaps it shall sit there and become the most overpowered desktop replacement that anyone can wish for.
Oh yeah, the read speeds on this thing are fun and may give you some insight into why we’re invested in keeping it around.
