Usually I'm a big believer in self-hosting.

But Friday my personal mailserver had a disk failure.

Would usually have RAID for redundancy but didn't because its now on a RPi and the usb host copes very poorly with multiple disks (I've tried many things).

Not to worry, I have an online backup from last night, right?

Wrong. Without boring you with details, I missed an "/" when I updated the backup script recently. I swear I saw it back up each file normally when I ran it manually the first time afterwards, but somehow the nightly backup has clobbered the backup root folder with a symlink.

I have an offline backup as well, of course, but its from late June.

Imaged and recovered the failed disk, but the folder structure is borked, if I really need a particular email I'll have to grep for it.

FML. Two months of emails.

Self-hosting is a great plan, but only if you're not a complete doofus like Low Information Voter!