Thanks Jim for getting Aeroscale back up and running.

Everything is up and running except the Home and News forums which don't come up other then a blank page telling me that the cache is updated every 10 min. Also everyone's Avatar picture is gone. When I went to check mine out in my settings/profile, the page isn't found.

Joel

It's wonderful that the #1 modelling site is back up; that was a painful couple of days without it.

Ben,
Good thing I had to put in a lot of hours at work the last few days.
Joel

Hi Joel

A few items such as avatars are still off-line. The latest update from Staff_Jim:

"The gallery is still down so some images for avatars and older articles won't be coming up. Files have been moving to the backup drive ALL night and still not done. "

All the best

Rowan

Just frightening to see a site with so many visitors go down because of a stupid hard disk failure?

Can this be avoided? with raid maybe?

I was thinking "RAID" too. As I understand that system. there are two hard drives at the server station, master and slave. Whatever is written to the master is simultaneously written to the slave, which functions as a real-time backup.

In any event, kudos to the techies who got the site back up in a very short time. [I could tell you a story about an important US immigration court computer with vital scheduling information that crashed and took months to get back online.]

Yay My favorite modeling website is back. Please don't leave us again.

What you are describing is known as RAID 1 whereby the data is copied onto two disks instead of one, thereby drastically reducing the risk of data loss in case of disk failure. It is NOT a back-up as it does not protect you from fires in the server room, or burglary of your computers!!! It only reduces the chance that you will ever need to restore from the back-up because of technical reasons.

For something like kitmaker, a RAID 5 or 6 could be more appropriate. These RAID levels combine splitting/mirroring data over multiple drives during read/write operations and therefore increase the speed of data access, while allowing also for hot-swapping. With such set-up, one can simply replace a failing hard drive without taking the system down.

Disadvantage is that you need 4 or 5 identical hard disks (and a computer able to handle a raid set-up) which makes it more expensive than using a single drive.

Guess I'm really still old school when it comes to computers, as I'm really unfamiliar with all this Raid applications. I gather that the KitMaker Network's server is just a single hard drive with a backup drive. Kind of like the system I use at home, but on a much larger scale.

Looks like the system has finished uploading all the files, as our Avatar pictures are back.

Joel