We're back! It was entirely my fault.

Some months ago I wrote a script that chiara calls every night, that rsyncs its hard drive to an external drive. With the power outage yesterday, the external drive didn't automatically mount, and thus chiara tried to rsync its disk to the mount point, which was at the time just a local folder, which made it go splat. 

I'm fixing the backup script to only run if the destination of the rsync job is not a local volume.