NASA solar mission data recovering after server room flood fiasco They can put a man on the Moon - but back on Earth, a busted water pipe managed to knock out NASA's solar mission data for months. Data from two NASA solar missions is becoming available again following an outage that began in November 2024. The affected missions are the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), which was launched in …
Pipes are everywhere, hidden in walls and ceilings. They lurk, unobserved. And sometimes they strike. I was a curator at the time, in a museum devoted to electricity. One morning I came to work and found the ground-floor exhibit halls several inches deep in water. Museums are often put in historic buildings, and they are at times repaired, refurbished, or extended -- without full attention to the consequences. Some time before the museum moved in, the plumbing had been modernized -- well, some of the plumbing. Which meant that iron pipes were joined with copper pipes invisibly in the ceiling. The joint finally gave away to electrolytic corrosion and let loose the flood.
The scrambling to save artifacts was intense, even before the pipes had a chance for repair. But we saved the pipe junction and got an excellent artifact demonstrating electrolytic corrosion. Well-documented, too.
You are never completely safe. Murphy is too ingenious.
It says the process will take several months. I read that as the time it takes to do the actual job, not the lead time. Either its a very large data set or possibly it has to be interleaved with other use of the tape drives such as doing the normal backups. I don't envy them.
been there. had just occupied the basement in the building. fortunately the server and backups were on the first/ground floor. first flood was caused when the muddy brook which was buried under a parking lot at the time overflowed and put a foot of water into the buildings basement all the way down the block. recovered from that and a week before christmas a water main broke just outside the front stairs putting things under 5 or 6 inches of water. most of the computer drives were above the level of the water so while the computers were dead the drives could be moved to spare machines and brought back up. got the entire office moved to the first floor conference room with networking and printers working as it was the end of the semester and these guys were at the busiest time of the year. both times the flooding happened at night over the weekend.
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