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Why Power Failures Can Always Lead To Data Loss

Posted by timothy on from the when-velcro-snags-shoelaces dept.

bigsmoke writes "So, all your servers run on RAID. You back up religiously. You're even sure that your backups are recoverable. But do you also need a UPS? According to Halfgaar (on Slashdot before to promote better Linux backup practices), yes, usually you do. He argues that despite technological advancements such as file system journaling, power failures can still cause data loss in most setups."

3 of 456 comments (clear)

  1. Well no shit, Sherlock by Skyshadow · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Power losses can cause data loss? Gee, you mean that my system that relies on electricity for everything it does can be adversely effected by power outages even if I take precautions? That's some good admin work there, Lou -- if only there was some sort of law that covered the tendency of things that can go wrong to go wrong...

    Next week: Fires can make things warm, floods can make things wet.

    --
    Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
  2. Don't for get to test people, TEST! by sco_robinso · · Score: 5, Insightful

    In my company, everything is behind UPSs. Our SAN is even behind 2 separate UPSs. We thought everything was configured properly, but you'd be surprised what comes to roost when you test everything.

    We recently had a test night where all we did was test the UPS system and shutdown procedures, and there was a couple gotchas. Interestingly, by default the APC powerchute app we were using defaulted to shutting down the UPS completely after the [first] server went down - not good. This was buried fairly deeply in the configuration.

    Equally important to any protection measure, be it RAID, Power Protection, whatever - is testing!

  3. He forgot UPS-triggered shutdown by SleptThroughClass · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The author did not mention having the system set up to have the UPS trigger an automatic shutdown.

    If you're not at the machine, or don't know how to shutdown without a CRT, the disk can get messed up when the UPS runs out of power. Unless you only have a desktop machine with no network applications writing to disk (no BitTorrent); then you might be OK if you just walk away from your keyboard and let the system become quiescent before it loses power.