Those of you trying to view or upload data last week probably noticed that these facilities weren't available.

We had a hard disk failure on the server. We had a report that it was getting flakey, and then it failed just as we started work on it to seee what state it was in. As the disks are mirrored in real time, this would normally just have required the disk to be replaced with a new one, and then in a short time the data would be restored from the mirror disk to the original one. This worked fine for one of the drives that the disk was partitioned in to, but not the other. So, time to dig out the backups and restore from them, plus manually set things like folder permissions.

All went well, and no data was lost, though it took a good bit longer than planned due to the failure of the mirror, and also it happening at a time when we were already pretty fully committed (as these things always do!), but now things are back to normal again, and we took the opportunity to increase disk capacity at the same time as the database continues to grow.