I have never lost important things on a hard drive...
...until today. When I got to work, I noticed that my build machine was completely nuts, and the upon reboot wouldn't boot. The filesystem wouldn't mount from a rescue CD. Looked very bad.

The crazy thing is that the next thing on my todo list, clearly marked for this morning, was to back up all the important things on the disk. Murphy must be laughing.

Anyway, after two hours of playing, swapping hard drive PCBs, using reiserfstools, and hoping for the best, the filesystem did mount, and I was able to retrieve all important information. There were weird things, like all of the directories from the root of the drive (usr, bin, sbin, and so on) existed within subdirectories of /etc, but it mostly worked. It would not mount after that. But that's okay. There was one shot at retrieving data and it was used.

I cannot tell why this system was using ReiserFS. I generally insist that all my build machines use ext3, which would not suffer the kind of errors Reiser did. Proper journalling could have saved a lot of hassle, especially since it was just a few bad blocks near the end of the drive.

The day wasn't over yet. As I was installing a new copy of Debian on a new drive for this machine, a big storm developed. The power went off, then on. Then, a minute later, it flickered again. Damn. Well, everything survived... but not quite. Turns out the dish on the roof stopped working. So out to the roof I went. No damage. But the radio box on the antenna was fried. It got replaced quickly, thankfully.

The day was over. And I guess I didn't lose anything important on the drive after all.