swestrup | -1 for Documentation, but +2 for Stable Methodology.

So, I am in the middle of reconstructing a broken raid array, copying the images onto new media and essentially resurrecting my mail/web server. Actually, I was in the middle of all of that last weekend when I ran out of time and had to concentrate on other things that were momentarily more pressing.

So, today when I finally manage to get back to the job, I find I have 3 new drives, all 1 TB, all visually identical, some partitioned, some not, and I realize I haven't documented a single thing I was doing last week. Now, typically, if I am working on a server with critical data, like this one, I keep a log of what I'm doing as I go along. Both to make sure I didn't forget anything crucial, and to ensure that if I ever have to go back and solve a similar problem on that hardware, that I have a record of what worked and what didn't.

Well, I've been rather under a lot of pressure lately, and quite frazzled, and so I completely forgot to maintain a log of my work. At first I was completely dismayed. Why had I set up the partitions the way I had? What was on them? Were they raid images? Filesystems? Unformatted?

Then, luckily I was distracted and had to help

taxlady put away groceries. While I was at it, I mentally started at square 1 and tried to decide how I would typically solve the problem of rebuilding the array. By the time I had gotten stuff put away, I had worked out a reasonable procedure in my head. Now, returning to the job at hand, its obvious exactly how far I had gone, and what I had been up to when I had to stop. Even the names I gave to certain mysterious image files suddenly made sense. Lets hear it for having a stable methodology that comes up with the exact same solution to a problem, when given the same inputs twice.

I shall now proceed to continue from where I left off last week.