Log

Dated, unedited, occasionally wrong. I leave the wrong ones up with a correction underneath, because that is usually the useful part.

14 August 2026 — the fan that wasn't

The enclosure's own status page claimed 1400 rpm. Drive temperatures said otherwise: 34 °C at the bottom bay, 43 °C at the top. I pulled the tray out and the fan blade did not move at all — the tachometer wire was reading noise from the power rail. Replaced with a 92 mm case fan and a printed bracket. The spread is now 2 °C.

Lesson I keep re-learning: trust a second, unrelated measurement. A sensor that reports what it wishes were true is worse than no sensor.

27 June 2026 — a backup that restored nothing

Six weeks of nightly runs finished with exit code 0 and copied almost nothing, because an exclude pattern I added for a temporary directory happened to match the parent of everything I cared about. The daily e-mail said "success" every single time.

I now do a restore of one random directory every month and diff it. It takes four minutes and it is the only part of the whole arrangement I actually trust.

19 May 2026 — three years on one cheap UPS

Eleven brownouts, one twenty-minute outage, no data loss. Runtime has fallen from eleven minutes to about four. Since a clean shutdown takes ninety seconds, I will keep it until it drops under two.

3 March 2026 — dust, mostly

Annual clean. Two hundred grams of hallway dust, one dead SATA cable found by swapping it out on a hunch, and a note to myself to stop routing power leads across the intake.