My FreeNAS server is back from the dead. After it stopped working and wouldn’t boot, I needed to plug in a monitor with a VGA connector (which I didn’t have yesterday) to see what was going on. It turns out that the boot drive, a USB stick, had failed.

Luckily, I have a couple other USB sticks lying around, and I had saved the FreeNAS configuration to my Mac recently. I was able to re-install FreeNAS to a new USB stick, re-upload my old configuration, and I lost no data or settings.

I think I will buy two identical USB sticks in the near future and mirror the boot drives. I would prefer this server to just run until the motherboard or power supply dies. This short period of downtime made me question whether I should even have a home server (or at least this home server), which is a question that I don’t really want to spend time thinking about right now.