Wed, 09 Aug 2023

Small tale of woe…

It’s like this…

I’ve had these servers in the basement for the last 5 years; which include the renovation we did a few years back. So they’ve been running 24X7 in some dusty conditions. I have plans to replace them soon…

But, the /home hard drive for our internal server started to fail. It went read-only on the 4th and I ordered a replacement. New drive arrived two days later; was actually correct :)

So I formatted and started to copy files back. Copying from the failing disk was not an option — it looked like was going to take about 140 days (and I had no good feeling about the conditions of the files).

So I started to copy from the recent back up I have. That took hours to get the ~900GB back (but better than days).

Unfortunately, I started my copy back with “cp -a;” it looks like that did not copy my hidden files. So I switched to good ole rsync. But I only realized the missing hidden files after I remounted the new drive as /home and rebooted.

When I went to use good ole rsync to restore those, I accidentally was too broad and updated my Maildir from the backup after postfix had delivered my new mail.

Thunderbird was not happy about that; after about 15 hours of 100% CPU use (one of eight CPUs so not really noticable), my inbox still looked really off.

So, I fell back to an older backup of Maildir on the server and .thunderbird on my workstation. All is right with the world except…

I lost email for the last 6 days :(

For the 3 of you out there who might send me email at my preferred address — I missed anything you sent from the afternoon of 8/3 until now.

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