It is still hectic this time of year and I am a few days late with this post again. We are closed the week of Christmas so Karl and I usually come in and do a year end inventory on the 26th. I went to print out the inventory count sheets and got a message that the server was not responding. I checked out the server and it was trying to reboot. I spent two hours doing everything the internet told me but could not get past the first few seconds of the reboot. I have four external drives with backups and an additional backup to the cloud. Unfortunately I had a problem with the backups about 6 months ago so I was starting to feel a little sick. Our whole company is on that server. I made and appointment at the Apple Store for the next day. The technician tried all of his tricks to no avail. He was going to have to send it to the shop where they could do a more detailed analysis but could possibly erase the drive. I said okay and I was really hoping my backups were good. The last ones were done at midnight of December 23 so they were current. I had been thinking about replacing the server as it is one of our last two computers with Intel silicone instead of Apple silicone and they can not be upgraded to the latest operating system. They told me it would take three days to check out the old server so I decided to bite the bullet, buy a new computer and try and restore it from the backups. I have two different backup systems, Time Machine, which backs up the whole computer except for the databases. Since the databases are live, this type of back up would corrupt the files so the server has its own back up system. On the 28th I bought the new computer and started restoring it from the backups. I also had to install updated server software. It went surprisingly smoothly and only took about 3 hours for everything except duplicating the backup schedule. I was elated and relieved. It is also noticeably faster. Since we weren’t doing any data entry, I waited until New Year’s Day to work on the back up schedule. It took about 5 hours to get all of the settings and file path names correct before I got the four local backup drives working. I came back in on January 2nd and spent another four hours figuring out how to do the backup to the cloud but it is all done now and a little better than the previous system I have which includes a weeks worth instead of just one day’s backup to the cloud. Apple called and told me there was no software fix for my old server and they could replace the hard drive for $300. I am not going to put any money into a 7 year old, obsolete computer.Anyway, we are back up and running. I am a lot more confident in my backups and know that if I ever have another catastrophic failure, I can be up and running within one day. Don’t forget to backup your backups of your backups.