I woke up this morning to a loud beeping sound. My wife was bounding up the stairs to investigate. It was coming from my server room, which was also filled with smoke. After determining that no actual flames were present, I powered off all the machines and the battery UPS boxes. I did notice that one machine was already off.

Long story, short: My media machine had burned. The power connectors on the Blu-Ray drive and the graphics card were melted and a bunch of wiring had burned. Fortunately, the PC cabinet was small enough that the air was exhausted before a huge flame could build. That was a lucky break.

And I am glad that I had a smoke detector in that room, and a fire extinguisher handy. On Monday, I am calling ADT to have a fire detector added (it detects rate of heat rise in case of actual flames).

Now, after prayers of Thanks, I need to rebuild that machine. I recovered the hard drives, but I am discarding everything else. Who knows what component might have caused the short circuit, Not worth the risk.

I hope sharing this bit of personal information causes anyone with lots of equipment, to reflect on safety measures. I know that I personally will no longer leave the house with all my servers running for any appreciable amount of time.

Ugh,

glad that nothing "really" bad has happened.
Most important is now to see where it came from and to recover all data.

good luck with that 

I've decided to use this excuse to just buy a new computer. I'm the type of guy that saves every screw, every bracket from years of tinkering. So, I don't usually upgrade frivolously, but in a case like this: I'm just chucking ("throwing away") the whole box - just keeping the drives.

In terms of the data, the drives seems to be OK. Even so, all my system images are backed up every night by Windows Server. And all my data is replicated at least once, and usually 2 or more times.

Thanks for the good wishes. I was feeling a bit nervous the other day, and it was kind of soothing to share the experience.

Quoting Blair:

Quote:
Oh... not fun.

People tend to forget how easy it is to lose data because they have become accustom to it being there with no problems. While you get irritated, you can somewhat accept losing a document because you did not save and the power went out, but for a drive to completely fail or similar and lose everything is a pain.

If anything it reminds you of the need to create multiple backups and not to put them all right next to each other.

I'm glad that it all worked out in the end.

Oh, it wasn't the data. Like I said that is backed up 6 ways til Sunday. I could have lost my house!