VPS Performance (Digital Ocean improvements)

I’ve been running this VPS from Digital Ocean for a few months now and while I’ve been impressed with network speeds/performance, it seems CPU/disk times times were bad. Just updating or accessing a page on my wordpress site could take 30 seconds to 1 minute or longer. Running updates with “apt-get upgrade” would take 15 minutes (over 10 minutes stuck at “Building dependency tree”).

Then last night I noticed that they have double the memory available and now with SSD storage at my pricing plan. All I had to do was log into my account, select the resize option and restart the VM. I immediately noticed the difference, updating wordpress is very snappy. All in all I’m very happy with my Digital Ocean VPS.

NAS disk corruption (the importance of backups)

I have two dedicated NAS devices (a DNS-323 and a newer DNS-325) that hold pretty much all our data. I do have backups for our photos, however I’ve been lazy and hadn’t got around to backing up our home videos yet. Well last week when I tried accessing the DNS-323 I noticed it was inaccessible, after logging into the web portal I noticed the 323 was wanting to format the drive…. not good, now I start getting worried. I pulled the Western Digital 2TB Green drive out of the DNS-323 and stuck it in my external USB 3.0 drive dock and plugged it into Ubuntu. The partition did not automount as it usually would and I couldn’t manually mount either. One of the first things I did at that point was to buy another larger disk to clone this one with the corrupt data. I have to say that I tried a commercial disk recovery solution (EaseUS) but that only recovered garbage that I never even had on my drive to begin with. In the end I was able to recover most of my data and I have documented the steps here. The moral of the story is to always have backups, and going forward I’ll be keeping all my data on a disk on my Proxmox server, the DNS-325 will be my on-location backup and my DNS-323 with be a secondary backup at a remote location.