I had so much hardware failing me in and around December, it's absurd!
One of the reasons I haven't updated here was that I mostly wanted to rant about all the equipment that was breaking on me and it was (is!) much too irritating to write about.
The latest (and worst!) casualty was the big RAID5 in the fileserver at home. (Before that it was powerbook, another Linux box at home, another disk, the old PowerMac G4 giving me trouble, etc etc).
All the others were annoying and obscenely time consuming, but losing data is really the worst. In particular because I could have saved the important bits if I had thought about it a bit harder.
When I had the chance I was counting on not having more bad luck, big mistake. There was too much data on the raid to copy everything and it was only in retrospect it became completely clear to me that some bits were more important than others. Most of my work is in some combination of backed up 2-3 times, in Subversion, safely tucked away on other servers, but there were some bits that really sucked to lose.
My ~5 year amazing trailer and commercial collection. A bunch of work on a FreeBSD based system running on Soekris boxes, some photos (hopefully those were all backed up elsewhere too) and a bunch of CD images that I could have picked the important ones to save. ... and probably more that I can't think of. The last slocate database was built after the RAID messed itself up, so the list of files I lost isn't even complete.
Aaarrrrgh. :-(
I feel your pain. :-(