So today the server locked up hard, 3 minutes before I had to go to work. Were it just a few minutes earlier, a restart would have solved it. However given the timing it was down as long as it was for the reason above.
This post is to bring people up to speed about what happened, what is going to happen, and what you can do to help if you should desire.
What happened was that during our server backups, which occur every 2 hours, the computer hard locked up, most likely a problem with the hard drive. Because of this we had to rollback 2 hours from the time of the crash, because the backup obviously failed.
What is happening, is that currently the server seems fine. But I am not going to sit on my hands waiting for the issue to become catostrophic. The idea is to supplement and/or replace the current hard drive with a new one so we don't have to potentially rollback a couple weeks back.
In light of that, we are looking to see if anyone is willing to chip in to buy us a new hard drive for the server. We don't want you to take initiative and just do it, should you desire to help, but we do want to know if there is anyone who can throw down. The plan is to set up a RAID array of hard drives, consisting of 2 or 3 total.
These drives work in a way that, should one fail, the other 1 or 2 still has our data and were still up and running. Let me know what you guys think.