NZ

I've never been to New Zealand, though I've friends from there and I'd love to visit. This stamp has a face value of only 1c, which probably wasn't ever enough to cover an Air Mail letter, so I've no idea how I've ended up with it on it's own - there is nothing else with it...

I spent today doing heart surgery on my home server. About 4.5 years ago, I replaced the innards of my already 5 year old home server. Out went the motherboard and the disks and in went a new faster motherboard, RAM, CPU etc, and a pair of 6 TB HDD. After about a week one drive failed, and was swapped shortly thereafter. The new replacement disk complained when it went in, but was fine thereafter too. Last autumn the disk monitoring software started to complain about the disk, and this spring it started to complain more about he disk, so while there had been no data loss, I thought it time to swap it out.

So basically the two 6 TB drives are in a mirrored pair, so you tell the OS that one drive is bad, so it stops using it, then you remove it from the array and shut the computer down. You then swap the failing drive, and not the good one, and reboot. You configure the new drive as a RAID member, and then add it to the mirror array. After a few seconds it starts to copy the data from the good drive to the new drive, and if you wait about 8 hours it's all done...!

This is a back blip, so we're now half a week into running and all is well. Hard drives tend to fail either very quickly when new or not for years and years... So it's a good sign. Annoyingly a separate 1 TB drive I use of off system backup isn't so happy, so I had to fall back to a 500 GB drive, which is now nearly full, but it's good to have all my pictures in more than one place!