ChibiOS Free Embedded RTOS

It just happened, a normal reboot and now it does not go past the initial screen, it does not even enter the BIOS menu.

I am unable to complete the release of ChibiStudio for Linux and various other things until it is repaired... I don't have everything on this laptop.

Giovanni

hope you had backup

I wish you good luck with the repair !

Alexandre

All ChibiOS related things are versioned so no problems. Some personal things are at risk if the SSD failed (and I don't think it failed).

Anyway, it is backup time for everything now

Giovanni

I can feel with you. My laptop just died also.
No booting, no bios. So bad.

I heard about a bad and nasty Virus is going around: Corona?

New power supply, new fans and it is back to work. Now backing up everything I could not stand losing my vintage photo collection of old Salerno....

Giovanni

welcome back PC

NAS are now inexpensive, i have bought an used 5 bay raid NAS for few bucks, and I use rsnapshot for my (and my wife) backups, it's rough, minimal, use unix intrinsics like crontabs and hardlinks.

if a disk begin to fail, the hotspare disk take the relay, the nas send me an email, internal NAS software rebuild the array and I change the faulty drive with a new one which become the new hot spare, all of that without operation interruption.

The price you have to pay, is that your 5 disks NAS has only the capacity of three disks.

But to everybody : do not ask yourself if your main disk will break, but when it will break, so backup everything

Alexandre

I need to buy one of those NAS too, it would be nice to have something running a Linux instance so I can use rsync and also have a subversion server at home.

Giovanni

You don't need performance for a backup server, so I stick a miniITX motherboard and a couple of drives in a small case - "headless" Linux and software RAID1 (so you're not reliant on how the motherboard manages the RAID if something breaks). Low power, so cheap to run. We get mains dropouts, so I choose motherboards which run off 12 or 24 volts, and hook them up to a battery backed supply.

Giovanni wrote:I need to buy one of those NAS too, it would be nice to have something running a Linux instance so I can use rsync and also have a subversion server at home.

Giovanni

I have a synology DS1511+, it's gnu/linux based and you can add synology maintained package, svn is part of the free offer. You can even add third party package from the entware ecosystem. I don't know other brands like QNAP, but they are probably linux based too.

Before that, i had a dedicated pc to do the job, but NAS are more robust, they are built to last, hard disk and electronic are under temperature control, and it's very easy to maintain : there is nothing to do, NAS autoload update and apply them when there is no client connected.
When disk fault, there is nothing to dismount, they are in a bay that can be extracted without tools and without stopping the device.

And yes, they should be powered from an UPS, i have link my UPS and NAS with usb cable and the NAS immediately recognise the UPS and is programmed to shutdown properly when battery goes below 30%. You can do the same with a debian based dedicated PC, but you will have to fight a little bit with configuration files.