Why there was a brief Gateway outage

Hard disk head By Agadez (Own work) ;CC-BY-SA-3.0. From Wikimedia Commons

Last week there was a brief gateway outage. Ying, VA3YH, sent the following message explaining the reason why.

Unfortunately, VA3YH suffered a hard drive failure in his home gateway machine. All VA3ODG D-Star data is running though this gateway machine. Fortunately he has a spare machine for it. When you are using old equipment, always prepare for hard drive failure. 🙂
It took VA3YH a few days to fully configured the machine and everything is back to normal now.

Ying also reported that OARDG is testing a second Internet route using the YMCA network.

The work that the OARDG system administrators do is greatly appreciated and this is the first gateway outage for a long time.  Thanks to Ying for getting the gateway up and running again so quickly.

Ying’s comment on having a hard drive back-up is a good one.  What is your back-up strategy? External disks, raid set-ups, internet back-up or other?  Let us know what you use and recommend, post a comment below.  My own back-up with my Mac systems is to use an external drive and Time Machine.  I have not had to use it yet.