then promptly went down the tubes. I’m talking about my Monday morning of course. Everything was going along nicely till some of my office mates started having difficulty accessing the storage drives on our server. I stuck my head in the server closet and noticed something strange going on with the lights on one of the drive bays. I also noticed a high-pitched whine - really high, almost inaudible. My first thought was that the bearings on one of the drives was failing. Turns out I’m probably right. Thankfully, the drive hadn’t totally failed. From time to time, you could successfully access data for brief periods and I was able to move the time sensitive project files over to a healthy drive. The rest of my data is on tape. I can restore that (that’s what it’s there for) but its a bit time consuming. Right now I’m trying to figure out what model of replacement drive I need to go with and if I should go ahead and look at replacing them all since they are the same age.

Rather than hassling with a tape restore, I may use an external drive with a Firewire interface to move the data off the failing drive. That will be a quicker restore - I hope.