My big black 1 terabyte network-attached storage (NAS) server died today. It was three and a half years old. It has, spread across its four 250GB hard drives (now sitting inertly in an unresponsive case), all 14,609 songs in our music library, and all of the pictures we've ever taken with any of our digital cameras, and years of semi-weekly backups.

I think it was a power-supply failure, but I can't be sure. Netgear's tech support was less than useless; I had to repeat everything I said three times because the bored eastern-European guy couldn't understand me and was completely unfamiliar with the product. His recommendation, which cost me $75 to get, was to buy a new NAS and drop the new drives in it. So, I'm going to try that, though I'm more than a little skeptical.

Luckily, I do monthly backups to a portable HD, which I keep at work; so I should be able to recover most of the pictures even if the new NAS enclosure doesn't like the old disks (assuming the backups were doing what I wanted...). But I don't have any recent backups of the music. And the backups I do have are only of stuff I'd bought from iTunes. So if those old drives don't agree with the new NAS, there will be weeks and weeks of CD ripping - and plenty of things which I'll never get back (live stuff, things I found on the Net, etc.).

F