Had a week from hell with a client's server migration

Last Tuesday I got called in to move a small law firm's server setup to a new rack. Thought it'd be a simple 4 hour job. Nope. Their RAID array threw a degraded status halfway through the transfer. Had to spend the next day and a half tracking down a bad SAS cable that was pinched behind the old chassis. The senior partner was pacing the hallway asking every 20 minutes if their billing data was gone. Ended up pulling an all-nighter to restore from a backup set that was 2 weeks stale. That was probably the worst 48 hours I've had since I started doing this work. Anybody else had a simple swap turn into a multi-day nightmare?

2 comments

2 Comments

mason8471mo ago

Whoa, okay that sounds rough but honestly a two-week old backup on a law firm is kind of on them for not checking that first. Your mileage may vary, but I've found that most "disasters" like this are just par for the course when you're dealing with old gear and people who don't want to pay for proper maintenance. Take this with a grain of salt, but it sounds like you did your job and the real headache was just bad planning on their end.

parkerh381mo ago

yeah totally agree @mason847, this is 100% on them. a buddy of mine had a similar thing happen at a doctor's office - they lost a week of patient records and tried to blame him until the logs showed nobody even checked the backup schedule for like 6 months.