It is that time of year when thunderstorms roll across the prairie to herald the forthcoming fall, dropping rain and trees with joyful abandon and walking across the night sky on legs of electricity and light. As I bumbled into my office on the morning after a particularly raucous example of the species had traipsed its way across the county I was greeted by the sound of silence, a sound that brings a certain sense of trepidation to the digitally dependent for silence is often a harbinger of loss.
There is something eerily peaceful about silicon at rest, when the last watt has left the UPS, the fans and disk platters lie still, the ever-present fog of white noise has lifted from the office, and the ghosts of software abruptly and prematurely terminated slowly ebb from RAM. It is the type of peace that wants to lull you into tranquility so that it may more easily let the monsters in. For some where in the quiet dark lies a fault, some malevolent dues ex machina waiting to bring chaos rather than resolution and the scary thing is that until the power is restored there is no way to know if the lurking daemons bring the silicon equivalent of hiccups or a stroke.
So I sat and waited bathed in the glow of my iPad, like the heroine’s second best friend in a teen slasher movie, for some stranger in overalls to reach through the ether and unleash the daemon lurking in my desktop. And when the lights broke through the gloom, that daemon extracted a terrible revenge as it was exorcised from its silicon domain, leaving behind a trail of broken links, bad inodes, and unrecoverable disk faults.
Yet I had no fear of this daemon and its random damage for, in my hubris, I assumed that I need merely call upon my backup system, my knight in shining bits, and such trifles would be dealt with. But this daemon’s handiwork had been to rip the very heart from my champion’s chest; not content to tear gaping holes through my data, this daemon had rent asunder my backup disk.
With the phone company’s repair crews trailing many hours behind those of the power company I had little hope of the calvary (in the form of my remote, off-site backup) coming to the rescue, recovery was destined to be a hard, byte level slog through my disks with only a data recovery program left over from my geek days as my guide if I wanted to get any real work done that day.
It’s been some time since the horror visited my office and, for the most part, things are back to normal – yes, the missing data came flooding back one the internet was restored, and on occasion, I still run into a remnant of the damage (incorrect permissions, a missing link), but these are just ghosts of the daemon’s passing. There have been a few changes – there’s a RAID array on order to replace my backup system’s single local disk, I am burning closed files to DVD (just in case), and I’m making better use of my UPS’s ability to command my computers to shutdown cleanly in low voltage conditions – but overall, the digital part of my office has healed.
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