When I wrote about Reliability and Security in a home network environment earlier, I never realized that I would have to put it to the test so soon!
About a week ago, my SBS 2003 server started hootin' and hollerin' at me. It turned out that the 200GB hard drive that held all of my data was the culprit. I rebooted the machine, came into the drive diagnostics and found out that the new drive that held all of my data had just given up the ghost! But since that drive was configured in a RAID 1 (Mirrored) configuration I had a bit of a reprieve. I broke the array, took the defective drive out of the drive caddy and rebooted. Everything just came up just fine! Sweet!
I immediately increased the frequency of my backups to my external USB drive to daily instead of weekly and called the drive manufacturer to request a replacement. I got the replacement drive today, loaded it into the drive caddy, brought up the RAID controller console, and asked it to rebuild my RAID 1 array. It took more than 2 hours, but I just got notified that the drive array rebuild was complete and that my RAID 1 array was functioning properly. My paranoia.. ah.. excuse me.... My disaster recovery and contingency plan just got validated big time! :-)