The weirdest thing… 

I have an old Netgear ReadyNAS sitting in my office closet that has been dead for several years. It failed to restart after a power outage and I have never been able to get it to power back on.

Most of the stuff on it was old mp3 and video files that I don’t care much about, but it also held a bunch of years' worth of old photos. They are all backed up in an S3 bucket, though, so I figured if I really needed any of them, I could probably get to them.

Three days ago, I heard fan noise suddenly start up in the closet. When I went and looked, the NAS had restarted and had begun restoring the storage array. Once I was able to remember what the IP address was, I was able to connect to it and mount the shares.

All of the data appears to be intact, and I am now racing to pull everything off of it before it dies again.