I've had a cold for about two weeks, one that seems to be a bit like that mythical snowball. It was so bad this morning that I have canceled the appointment I had with my consultant tomorrow. I won't drive there and I don't want to expose everybody else to my viruses.

Then, at about 5pm on Saturday last, the hard disk on my main server died. Joy! Try fixing that when you barely know which way is up!

TL;DR: Don't worry, folks, all the important stuff (the manuscripts, such as they are) are backed up. Unfortunately, what wasn't backed up was all the local configuration. Make sure you include all that in any backup scheme!

That server carries all our day-to-day needs. It acts as a terminal server for thin clients around the house and runs 24/7. Dead quick, it means that you can go from switching on a terminal to a login dialog in 15 seconds.

The disk is actually one of the oldest that I am still using, and ought to have been changed out ages ago (the date code on it is 08382, which I'm guessing means sometime in 2008). That, of course means scheduling down time to transfer everything to a new disk - assuming that I had a suitable replacement. So, the inanimate object decided to do its own scheduling...

I won't bore you with my recovery process, except to say that almost everything has now been recovered. In the meantime I'm using my "media" machine, as it has both a 3.5" caddy and a 2.5" caddy which can take the old and new disks. This machine has a 500Gb disk which means plenty of spare room for pulling files. (Hmm, that one isn't all that new, either.) Anyhows, I used a program called "myrescue" and it seems to have gotten most things off, though it took around 12 hours to do it.

One of the consequences of losing all the config that I have built up over the years is that nothing looks right. LibreOffice Writer comes up with default settings, which means it underlines everything and doesn't know about Anmar.dic, which of course is very important. I have created my own custom toolbar with just the buttons I frequently use, and that is gone too, meaning the default bars with all kinds of weird junk of no interest.

Firefox? Looks strange, especially as there is no Adblock or Noscript running. I hate the current version of Firefox, it is dog slow, an unusual experience for me. I think the best way is to nuke it from orbit...

Another major problem is Thunderbird. This refuses to find the whole file tree with my existing email settings and insists I ought to create a new email account... who writes this stuff? So recovering the config is vitally important and is the main lesson I take from this.

So, when will the next chapter of anything be up? I can't promise anything at this point, especially considering this miserable cold. Possibly at the week-end. That means that I lose part of the buffer of chapters that I had built up, but then again that's one of the reason we have buffers, after all.

And of course it means I have to (a) spend on more hardware and (b) spend time fixing stuff when I'd rather be doing something more useful. Next time I'll be more careful.

Penny