I saw an e-mail going around a while ago (not sure when but I think it was in the last few weeks) about someone who had worked at both Google and Microsoft and was comparing the experience between the two companies. One thing he said was that at Google there was an IT store or something like that on each floor where you could get your computer fixed. One of the comments was something along the lines of "If Google hires such smart programmers why do they need an IT department?". I was thinking something similar since I have been both a programmer and a system administrator for most of my career. The last two weeks I realized why there are dedicated IT people in companies.

I was copying a large file to my web server when the machine reported that the network connection was lost. I thought it was no big deal and I would just get around to copying it the next day. The next day I had e-mail that my web site was down. When I looked the server was in a constant reboot cycle. After a few days in recovery console and running checkdisk I realized that something had gone wrong with the disk. I am not sure what it was but I lost a directory that had the backups of the How Do I videos that I am making for Microsoft. I ended up rebuilding the machine. To make matters worse the XP Home edition machine that our family shares also developed problems. I ended up rebuilding it as well. The total time to do it wasn't that long but since I have a "day job" I could only work on the evenings and weekends which stretched it out to more than 2 weeks to get everything back up and running. I was thankful for my backups but realized that I need a better solution. I am still working on that better solution but for now I have a 1TB drive sitting near my server that I am backing up to.