Commentarii interretiales de ædificium

Throughout its 12 year history, the Aedificium server has had several run-ins with various incidents afflicting its uptime. For that matter, part of the reason why the server itself was founded and, in fact, garnered most of its community was squarely due to a now-long-defunct server named TatsuCraft Freedom going permanently offline; this was prompted by a data loss incident which, unfortunately, brought an end to that server’s legacy. It was for this reason, among many others, that I was admittedly unwilling to consider any permanent closure of the Aedificium server when, 2 months ago, a power surge delivered to the physical server thus culminated in partial corruption of the solid state drive (SSD) and its boot sector. (This very revelation took several weeks in order to be revealed, for it was not immediately evident that any part of the drive was recoverable until the haphazard use of data recovery software proved such things to be indeed true.) Through trial and error, almost the entire contents of the drive have since been recovered, with the server now being re-opened at what seems to be the exact state in which it was left. In other words, all of the data pertaining to the Minecraft server has been fully recovered, and the server is now back as it was, in spite of the small number of improvements I have already made to its back-innards since its initial resurrection.

This is, most shamefully, not the first time that the server has fallen victim to brief interruptions in service due to data loss incidents, or the threat thereof. On August 31 2015, the server (at the time bearing the name of Chromium) was brought offline due to a data loss incident, which subsequently forced the main world (then known as the “adminworld”) to roll back by approximately one month’s worth of progress. At the time, this was devastating to us builders who had made a great deal of progress on that particular world and, moreso in particular, to myself, who had just begun to start polishing my newfound server creation. In my defense, it was undoubtedly thanks to my long-held practice of making routine backups of the server’s contents that availed an older version of the world to resupply the server to begin with, and so it could very well have brought about the ultimate destruction of the server. Thankfully, it did not: however, it was still an inconvenience to the server’s playerbase, as was this most recent downbringing. And so, this last occurrence confirmed to me that it would be necessary to take preventative measures from hereon, once the server had been brought back online.

I can now comfortably say that the physical server is configured in such a manner that is resistant to the long-term effects of storage device degradation, power surges and other sources of failure, be they mechanical or completely silicone. The server is now fitted with a software RAID 1 configuration across 2 x 500GB SSDs, which should provide enough redundance to preserve its contents for a long time going forward.