I'm going to start with my apologies for the 24 hour outage. Thankfully there should be little impact beyond that.

I've been running all of this on a single box, and had plans (last night in fact) to expand it to two with a NAS backend to help protect it from failures and improve performance.

Ironically, the morning in which I planned to make those updates was when I experienced some sort of disk failure on the server. I don't know exactly what happened and the exact level of failure (diagnosis of that will be tonight, mostly to see if I need to get a warranty replacement, or if there was some software cause).

The disk failure presented itself as bad blocks and mild data corruption which prevented multiple services from running.

The good news is that it appears nothing of real importance was corrupted. We lost the majority of one database table, but all the table contained was a list of every single activity-pub contact the server could see and it's contents should be reconstructing automatically now (though obviously may take a while).

It might be worth checking your friends/followers to make sure there are no major absences, I don't know if this impacts who you're following or just the basic contact info.

Beyond that, here's what's changed and changing followed by accountability for my mistakes:

* The server now has a NAS backend with disk redundancy which will protect against drive failures, it also helps to share resources between this server and a second server once I have the drive issues figured out.
* Once the original server is fixed/cleared it will be running a load balanced second copy of the webserver (and eventually a copy of the database) to improve performance and reliability. (The nas will allow two copies of the server to share the same media files)

For accountability:

One of the things that made the failure take longer to recover from was the fact that my backups of the database had failed to run due to a typo.

I could have sworn I had checked it to ensure it was running, but clearly I had not.

I fixed the error and confirmed it ran successfully this morning. Database backups are run twice daily and backed up to a remote **encrypted** backup (borgbase.com). I will be checking periodically over the next week or two to confirm that it continues running.

Additionally, with the NAS now set up and available I am running full system snapshots of the database twice a day as well. This means I should have two avenues for recovery across two different methods going forward, which should significantly increase reliability.