The Dynamic Duo

tap. tap. tap … This thing on?

Hi there! Not sure is any of you remember me, but this is UltraBob, your infrequent to the point of almost absent host/god. I just wanted to pop in real quick and apologize real quickly for any of you who may have tried the access the site and do something comment related during a 24 hour period or access the site at all during the much shorter period when the server was down altogether. A hard disk in the sever was failing, and it decided to fail starting from where the database was stored. Fortunately I had a good backup less than 24 hours because I have automatic updates set to take place every day. I had never had a hard disk poop out on me before, and it just goes to show the importance of having a good backup. I mean this is just a web server. It doesn’t hold my most precious documents like all of the photographs I’ve taken in the last 3 years and my plans for world domination. Every computer system I own is set up to be backed up every 24 hours, and if yours aren’t make them that way unless there is no data on your machine that you would be devastated to lose. No photos of kids or grandkids? No irretrievable e-mail? No home movies you’ve edited? No DRM encumbered music or video that you’d have to pay for again were it lost? Nothing at all? Then you probably don’t need to backup, but you probably don’t actually really need a computer all that horrible much. I backup m most important stuff to DVDs and take them offsite about once a year, just in case of a fire or something else too, but the much more likely problem is a hard drive meltdown, accidental deletion, or one of the other myriad things that can go wrong in day-to-day operations. If you are on a mac I recommend you backup to a firewire connected hard drive as you can boot your mac directly from a firewire drive. Windows users I recommend you switch (I mean what are you waiting for? Vista?), but that is a different story.

All for now, stay tuned for an audio-related announcement before long.