Part of my automated daily backup routine is making a redundant copy of my C&D drives to a pair of external hard drives tucked away out of sight behind my scanner. (Those drives are also backed up to a hard drive inside the tower case.)

I was looking behind the scanner for something, and noticed that the power lights on the two hard drives were not lit. Uh-oh. Apparently there was a brief outage (maybe half a second or so?) that my solar panels and battery storage system didn't catch, and the drives went off-line.

That was back on November 5, so I was living dangerously with only one set of current backups instead of the normal two. This has inspired me to drag out the off-premises backups and get them up to date as well.

My philosophy is that as long as I have multiple redundant backups I'll never actually need them, and this has been the case for the last 15 years.

Time to add a warning to that automated routine when it fails…