January 3, 2021 Freenas Gamecache Gaming Hardware ISCSI Open Source Software Storage Technology 0

That was interesting.  I at least annually wipe my windows boxes to keep the Windows bitrot in check.  Over time windows just gets cruft built up.  Stuff gets installed, uninstalled or never updated and starts causing problems in the background.  These problems can be anything from weird errors, to occasional crashes to the system going slow even with an SSD installed.  I decided it was time to do this maintenance on my system.  For most folks they would cringe at nuking their system and starting over..however I have something I call Gamecache setup in which my recovery time is much much faster.  I do not keep a ton fo stuff installed on my machine anyway..and anything that would be persistent(especially games) is stored on the Gamecache and not locally so nuking isn’t that painful.  All of my documents, pictures, etc etc etc are actually NOT on my local SSD anyway for this very reason.

Well this nuking became very different in a hurry…and while a bug like this is normally devastating to just about anyone..my storage setup made recovery a trivial affair.  You can read about the initial adventure over at my business blog.  In short,  a sound networks storage and backup strategy saved some of the most important data i posses personally and more importantly in my business.  Whew!  While it was stressful once i realized Windows 10 had eaten my entire data setup…i was able to recover the data in less than 15 minutes.  Reloading Winders took about 20 minutes and I was back up and running..:)