In the past week, I successfully upgraded my total local storage to roughly 8.2 TiB. That's a lot of space, more than I will fill up for years to come (maybe); but in doing so, I mucked up the rest of my system pretty fierce. Long story short, I corrupted a bunch of system files and ultimately had to do a complete wipe and re-install.
Now, however, my system is faster, it looks better, and I have the warm feeling that it's much cleaner and ready for anything I can throw at it. Oh, and it's at least as recoverable as before, probably moreso.
A couple very good lessons I have pulled from the experience:
- Bare metal to a minimally-usable desktop takes about 1.5 hours
- A fully-100% ready system takes about 6 hours
- Said 100% restore takes less time each time I do it
- The current backup scheme is adequate only if the system itself is minimally usable
- A full system failure will be added to the list of covered scenarios
- I learn new things each time this happens
