Just as soon as I got into the office this morning, our Mac-based mail server beeped with an alert that stating that something was wrong with one of the hard disks and that I'd better check it. The problem disk turned out to be an external SCSI drive that I had all my server programs running off of. At that point the disk was already making clicking sounds every few seconds (not a good sign!). I unmounted the disk, powered the drive down, powered it back up, but it never came back, even after a server restart. I even hooked it up to another Mac but no go. I ended up using an old backup of all the server programs that was already on the server's internal hard disk. I had a newer backup of just the accounts database on my PowerBook so using Timbuktu I transferred the data to the server, deleted all old accounts, disconnected server from the network, and imported the newer accounts data. We have backups of all recent incoming and outgoing emails so I had the server reprocess all messages from like 5pm yesterday onwards. I then updated serveral pieces of software (EIMS 3.1->3.1.2 and SimpleText Filter 1.2->1.2.4), tried to fix all aliases and file/folder references I could recall, then put the server back online. PHEW! Then I deleted old accounts, recreated a few group accounts that had been wiped out, and backed up the accounts database and all server programs. Will need to follow-up tomorrow or in the next few days to replace the SCSI drive and ensure that the server is running smoothly. Spent most of the rest of the day converting our digital video clips to progressive-QuickTime format. This involved learning a lot more about digital video encoding (by reading the Cleaner manual!) and doing dozens of encoding "experiments".