In 2010 I self hosted a Xen hypervisor and used it for everything I could. It was fun!
I had a drive failure in my main raid 5 array so bought a new disk. When it came to swap it out, I pulled the wrong disk.
It was hardware raid using an Adaptec card and the card threw the raid out and refused to bring it together again. I couldn’t afford recovery. I remember I just sat there, dumb founded, in disbelief. I went through all the stages of grief.
I was in the middle of a migration from OVH to Hetzner and it occurred at a time where I had yet to reconfigure remote backups.
I lost all my photos of our first child. Luckily some of them were digitised from developed physical media which we still had. But a lot was lost.
This was my lesson.
I now have veeam, proxmox backup server, backuppc and Borg. Backups are hosted in 2 online locations and a separate physical server elsewhere in the house.
Backups are super, SUPER important. I’ve lost count how many times I’ve logged into backuppc to restore a file or folder because I did a silly. And it’s always reassuring how easy it is to restore.
I didn’t understand this so I looked it up.
https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Maiar
Pretty cool.