August 23 Downtime

[DrSpooky]

Hi,

We had a few hours of downtime today. The hard drive which we write backups of the site to failed. I have disabled use of that drive until I can figure out what the right thing to do is.

I don't remember exactly when the computer running the site was purchased but I am thinking at least 5 years ago. We have been hosting the board at our house since 2003-4 and the EC Wiki on the same machine for 2 years this month.

So the equipment is getting older and I just need to decide what to beg for.

[DrSpooky]

Just to update you all of why we had downtime Saturday. The external hard drive we use for backups failed. I have moved it to another computer and duplicated the problems it had. This is good because it definitely means the external hard drive is the source of trouble. I tried to reformat it. If it was just a matter of bad spots on the disk, then reformatting could discover and work around those. After 12 hours it was still trying. This indicates a more severe problem with the disk.