[plug] RAID, and what it can't solve

[Senectus .]

There is a quote out there that goes something like this:
There are two sorts of people in the world, Those who don't do backups
and those that have never had a disk fail on them.

Then again.. I think it was Linus that said "Backups are for wimps,
real men upload their data to FTP sites and let others replicate it"

;-P

On Tue, 22 Jun 2004 07:08:05 +0800, Craig Ringer
<craig at postnewspapers.com.au> wrote:
> 
> Hi folks
> 
> I thought I'd drop a note to remind anyone considering RAID that it's
> not total data protection. Backups, backups, backups.
> 
> Why do I mention this now? Because I just had my own paranoia borne out
> by a double disk failure in a 4 disk RAID 5 array. Darn thing was half
> way through rebuilding onto the hot spare when the second disk died. The
> array is only two days old, too - 4x250GB SATA Western Digital disks, +
> hot spare.
> 
> Thankfully, I keep system snapshots on SATA disks (mmm... hot swap) in
> addition to tape backups, and of course I'd just updated the snapshot
> when migrating from the old array. I was able to make a fresh snapshot
> off the degraded array before trying to rebuild - just in case something
> might've been misssed - so didn't lose even a tiny bit of data.
> 
> --
> Craig Ringer
> 
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-- 
Attacking Linus' integrity and character is like clubbing baby seals. 
- PJ, Groklaw.net