This is why we make backups

[giza]

Sometimes disk controllers just uh, eat their children data:

http://www.unixshell.com/forum/showthread.php?p=6749

I wasn't affected by this, but still... that's creepy!

Comments

[scs-11.livejournal.com]

Been there, ate that dogfood. We now have backups and failovers on completely separate hardware sets, and will shortly be adding a redundant backup. We've had a variety of different vendors RAIDs and RAID controllers over the last couple of years, and [i]every single one of them[/i] has had at least one disaterous failure mode.

[kovucougar.livejournal.com]

There is no such thing as a perfect RAID. I found multiple scenarios with 'server' grade RAID that always seems to fall over. On hardware raid, it usually had to do with RAID metadata and the difficulty in rebuilding it.. Funny to think I was staring at just such a scenario one day and thinking "I wish this was software raid!"

Heh.

[zorinlynx.livejournal.com]

I frequently have to knock sense into people who think that RAID is a substitute for a backup. People are stubborn and don't realize this, though, until:

a) They lose two drives at once (more frequent than you think)
b) They fat-finger an rm command and wipe out a few directories of important data.

Whoops! RAID is never a substitute for a backup. Even an external hard drive that you rsync to on a regular basis is a good thing to have.

That's what I do, and every few months I take the drive to work and write it to an LTO3 tape.

-Z

[cheetah-spotty.livejournal.com]

They should fire their incompetent sysadmin who thought that RAID arrays eliminate the need for backups.

[giza.livejournal.com]

Oh, they were quite explicit about the fact that there were no off-machine backups. Users were told from day one that they should perform backups for their data.

[fc-greyfox.livejournal.com]

Sysadmin Standard Rule Umpty-three:
   If the data has value, back it up.
   If the data is important, back it up thrice to three different places.

Rule Umpty-four:
   No backup? no job. Have a nice day. :)