What a day was today. And it started something like last Friday or Saturday when I found that one of the hard disks in one of my main servers had malfunctioned. And this time it was a major thing as my main development environment was not available, meaning I couldn’t really work on my major project.
So I was very down and my mood was not so good the last few days, but somehow I have already learned something like ‘this too shall pass’ and something like ‘it can and just will be fixed sooner or later’. And what I learned the last few days that by slowly planning and doing the things needed to fix the problem, or actually problems, I slowly moved from a very unstable and not fully working system to a system that is now kind of working with at least a backup system that is working more or less and the major system in the process of being fully restored, probably tomorrow, but certainly somewhere this week.
And what I also learned is that writing about these things helps me, analyzing these things helps me to realize that things are not as bad as they felt when it actually happened. And I also know more and more that it is important to have backup systems, which I always had, but, like now, not fully in place.
But just like with aviation safety, I realize more and more that I do have backup systems in place, and yes, I also realize more and more that things do go wrong, like hard disks just fail every now and then.
So the next thing is to realize that even something like this, a major crash where I indeed lost quite some data, fortunately this time probably only private data, do happen, will happen. And that you just need to be prepared for that. And that I, and probably you, are more prepared than you think. At least if you think a little bit like me.
So next thing is to learn to not be so much affected by a simple, normal failure of a hard disk or something like that. As it is just part of life and if you are prepared for it, it’s not such a major thing. And with some proper planning it’s not even something to be emotionally affected by it, other than see the positive side that it was not as bad as it originally seemed.
But yes, do have safety features in place, as especially with mechanical stuff and such, things do fail, do have some kind of life time.