For those not familiar with Murphy's Law, it states "if anything can go wrong, it will". No more true than with IT things!
One day a week (mostly) I assist in the archives of a local museum. In late 2010, we spent time migrating the archive database to
ModesXML - lots of planning and test runs, finally completing the task in early 2011. Ideally we should have dedicated a server to the database; its resource demands will grow as data and user access grow. But money is tight, so we took the opportunity to put the database onto a lightly-used PC - which also happened to be the newest so it was quite well specified. Worth a mention here is that it runs 32-bit Windows 7 for legacy reasons.
All was well after initial migration. Subsequent customisation took place, along with creation of templates, lists of object terms, many new entries, and so on. It was gratifying to see the system settle in and moulding to our needs.
During the early weeks of 2012, some odd behaviour had been noted on the backup drive - a Samsung 1.5TB USB Story Station. Some days it would fail to start, requiring manual switch off, a pause and then on again. Then it started throwing errors during backups. Running
CHKDSK would usually fix it for a few days, then it reverted. This went on for many weeks as investigation was hampered by more serious issues: broadband internet faults, viruses in other PCs on site - oh, and an incapacitating leg injury!
