Death and taxes
It’s said that the only two certain things in life are death and taxes. If the panama papers taught us anything, it’s that taxes aren’t actually a certainty for everyone. That leaves death. Recently my beloved 3TB external hard-drive had an appointment with the grim reaper.
Resurrection?
I have at least passing familiarity with certain recovery tools, such as testdisk but alas, it was to no avail. The partition table was destroyed and I couldn’t rebuild it, change it, reformat the drive, or anything. Resurrection is likely still possible, but beyond my current abilities. Fortunately I had recent backups of most of my stuff, so I lost very little of any appreciable value.
The march of progress
I could succumb to grief over my dearly departed drive, but I chose to find a suitable replacement. I decided upon procuring a NAS. This would allow me to access my stuff from multiple devices, without being directly connected to the device via cable. It also allows for some interesting projects down the road. A sort of small scale homelab kind of thing. Having some familiarity with the QNAP brand, I stuck to what I know and bought myself some 4TB Ironwolf drives and set them up in a RAID-5 configuration, so that if a drive fails, it can be replaced and will rebuild itself relatively painlessly. I’m aware this is no substitute for a proper backup however.
