TO: whomever is reading this

SUBJECT: critical HDD failure

DATA:

A few weeks back one of my WD 4Tb Reds crapped out – production date said 2017 but I bought in 2018.

It was no longer being recognized by the HDD controller – the usual story. Sadly it was part of an LVM volume which was partially striped so… data loss.

Luckily, through some HDD black magic was able to restart the firmware and get it to properly spin up and recovered most of my stuff, in part thanks to the wonderful testdisk program. It has saved my bacon more than once. It can read even corrupted filesystems – isn’t that just great?

Well, then I had issues with docker – my wordpress container was not building anymore – something about alpine and some new extension… who cares, right?

Finally, we are back, and now this website is stored on a MIRRORED volume – yup, I learned a lesson. Never trust WD Reds! Maybe… But also, keep backups(which I do – for this site at least).

Over and out