im sure some of you noticed the server went down quite often in the last month first I downgraded the system to 12.04 LTS in the process I backed up my home folders in a .tar.gz this was my first problem NEVER use tar.gz on critical backups use tar.bz if you need the tarball compressed. Any way I just threw the the tarballs on my older media HDD and when I tried to decompress it it kept getting stuck and when I tried to pull them off the server it would get stuck or transfer very slowly at times and at others it would be at full network speed. Turns out the HDD was not too happy and I knew the drive was throwing up the occasional S.M.A.R.T errors but the drive decided to start having corrupt sectors after I migrated. I recovered as much data as I could but I lost a lot of data including a full user profile and all of the emails stored on it and that had more than a few critical info emails so yeah bad luck on the timing.
if i had the money to set up a RAID 5 I would but 3 1 TB drives would run me $300 after shiping and I don’t have that kind of money
TL;DR version
Dont compress critcal files with tar.gz and dont ignore S.M.A.R.T errors.
