Backup Server Issues

Now here's something I've never seen before. I keep a backup server for Time Machine and other backups on a Promise SmartStor DS4600 (4x1TB drives), and it has worked flawlessly for the past 5 years. Today, it stopped working all of a sudden. There were no warning signals (audible or visual), nor did there seem to be anything mechanically wrong (fans were spinning, etc).

It turns out that the heating and cooling of the unit over the past 5 years caused the HDDs to slip out of their connectors. All I needed to do was nudge 3 out of 4 of them back into place (I didn't need to reseat them, just push them back in) and the unit started working again.

Crazy. This incident now has me thinking about backups for my backups.

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