OddThinking

I mislaid some data this week. About 60 GB worth. No, it’s okay. There’s no reason to panic. In fact, I am happy that I remained unpanicked the entire time. I was disappointed and frustrated, but not panicked.

I knew the data was never lost – just temporarily mislaid. It was always being stored safely on the magnetic surface of the disk – in fact replicated on two disks – but I just wasn’t sure where it was.

The sad part is that I got in this situation because I was trying to be good. I was trying to reconfigure my machine to use RAID to keep my data safe, and I ended up leaving it shipwrecked on an unknown island in a magnetic ocean.

The cause was a user ignorance – the steps I took made perfect sense from my conceptual model of the way RAID controllers work – but clearly my conceptual model didn’t match reality.

I’ve recovered all the files on an assortment of media, and now I am just in the process of putting Humpty back together again.

Sigh.