Crash and Burn

No, not the monikers of Dade and Kate from the film 'Hackers' but rather my freaking hard drive crashed and then when I ran over to the NAS 440 to obtain a backup saw that it had experienced a system board failure after a hard drive failure in which a second hard drive in the raid array also had its data scrambled leaving it an usable paper weight.

Crash and burn.

So, I pulled a workstation image from an offline source that was 60 days old and my latest offline backup which was only a week old and rebuilt everything from scratch. I'm back in business with respect to the workstation.

However, the NAS is fried. So I took a second workstation and am putting SME server on it and will simply create a server to use as a backup server to replace the NAS. I lost all the data on the Raid 5 NAS server; however, fortunately I had a fairly recent backup of it.

The lesson is never trust anything or anyone outside of the Lord your God... lolol. Always have a backup.

I don't care if you're using an $1,100.00 BlackArmor NAS with Raid 5. It failed me and is now nothing but something I plan on using for target practice at the shooting range. Always have a backup. Always have a backup. ALWAYS have a backup.

Very Good Advice

And though I have NOTHING to hide whatsoever, I like strong encryption as an added measure against hackers and thieves who want to take it and exploit it. And do they ever. I've even heard of Asian hackers in Canada calling people's grandparents in the U.S. claiming they had a auto breakdown or were in a Mexican jail and needed money just as one sample. They have a thousand scams to play with even a little of your private information.

But encryption has challenges. Many people have lost all their data because they messed up the encryption process, lost their encryption key, the encrypted data got corrupted by some means, etc...

Remember, there are alternatives to encryption without the risks of encryption and if you don't know how to encrypt and maintain reliably encrypted data: then don't do it!

But if you are crazy enough to risk your data to a strong encryption method, like me, then make sure you choose a secure and reliable encryption method and store your encryption key in a safe place along with a backup (such as private save deposit box in bank vault) and good luck because you'll probably need it at some point attempting to decrypt your data.