Slashdot Mirror
Why Mirroring Is Not a Backup Solution
Craig writes "Journalspace.com has fallen and can't get up. The post on their site describes how their entire database was overwritten through either some inconceivable OS or application bug, or more likely a malicious act. Regardless of how the data was lost, their undoing appears to have been that they treated drive mirroring as a backup and have now paid the ultimate price for not having point-in-time backups of the data that was their business." The site had been in business since 2002 and had an Alexa page rank of 106,881. Quantcast said they had 14,000 monthly visitors recently. No word on how many thousands of bloggers' entire output has evaporated.
While this mirrors previous comments, it's not really a backup solution.
Excellent! We can use their demise as yet another cautionary tale.
This is fascinating and altogether newsworthy. I had never before thought of this. I am very pleased, indeed, that kdawson engaged his most finely-honed editorial faculties to post this article to the front page, as it is not only stunning and fascinating in substance but also rather eloquently written.
I do not think it means what you think it means.
Today's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why. -- Hunter S. Thompson
I am experiencing a strange phenomenon. The jaw-drop reflex has been popping my mouth open for several minutes and won't stop. If I focus I can close it, but then it pops open again. wow.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Important note: don't hire the IT dude with Journalspace.com on his resume.
1. Do not talk about backups
2. DO NOT TALK ABOUT BACKUPS
You pay your infrastructure people to maintain business, continuity I mean the tittle of this post made me go, "Really, no shit" That's like systems admin 101! If the admin was aware then the manager that didn't listen needs to be fired. If the manager listened and they are just run by retards then they got what they deserve. You'd think 17,000 visitors a month would be worth enough to do it right, in add revenue alone. The cost of a consumer machine running linux with a few TB's of SATA space - $1200 How much the company paid to have a system's admin play video games all day - $50,000 The cost of a 17,000 vistor a month site going down because they had no data base backups - Priceless.
I'm more surprised that the site lived for 6 years without back-up. That's pretty hardcore.
Screw that!! IT Departments are cost centers and have absolutely no benefit to the bottom line of a company... none at all... nope.
Indeed. Everyone knows that when you drive your company into the ground through incompetence you don't give up! You go to Washington to get your bail out. That's the American way.
This post cannot be rebroadcast without the express written constent of Major League Baseball.
C:\>rm -rf /
'rm' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
Everything's still running here...
"If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning."
Catherine Aird
Quoted in the Book Practical UNIX & Internet Security
As if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
Ha! I store all my data in directory names!
Absolutely correct! Why management here is drooling over how much they money could save if they just didn't need the damn IT department. And all those damn desktop computers! Why, life was much better back in the days of paper ledgers and pencils! Sigh - if only we could have the perfect company. One which only has high level managers and none of the "riff raff" that infects them. Oh! Wait! That's Congress. And they have a monopoly.
Pay the salary of someone smart enough to handle your data correctly if you have no interest in becoming smart yourself.
The first step is admitting you are stupid. That is hard for most people. Of course today they are having NO trouble making that cognitive leap...
I pity the fool who hahas?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I tried Googling, but the only results I got were a medical office in Chinatown.....
"City hall" in German is "Rathaus" Kinda explains a few things......
$ del C:\*.* /s /q /y
-bash: del: command not found
Guys...
Of Code And Men
Maybe they should have used this backup strategy, although this one looks more like this...
Judging by your OS, not for long
df -h
1. The file system must be ZFS. If your FS' acronym is more than 4 characters long, your data is fucked from the beginning.
2. Backup often: if it's not done every five minutes, your data is stale and totally not fresh.
3. Off-site backups: you need to Fedex your shit to five different corners of the world at a minimum. If a fire breaks out, you can call your offices in Uganda for the restore disks/tapes.
4. Secure your backups: keep guard dogs, armed mercenaries and Jason Statham nearby. In the likely event that your hard drives get jacked, you can always rely on Statham to kick down a door or two to save the day.
5. ???
6. Profit.
Journalspace CTO: We don't need an expensive off-site backup solution b/c we mirror all of our data real-time. It's genius!
-entire database gets overwritten-
Journalspace CTO: Ohhhhhh...now I get it.
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
See mirroring is like...well a mirror. If you stand before one and stick a fork in your eye your mirror-image does the same. In real time. Analogies are there for a reason.
There's a major flaw in your analogy. See, if I stick a fork in my right eye, the mirror image will stick a fork in his left eye. Between the two of us, however, we still have one good left AND right eye. So ipso fatso, I have a complete backup.
This guy's the limit!
What about archive.org?
Ah, apparently not... :-D
Using HTML in email is like putting sound effects on your phone calls. Just say <strong>no</strong>.
operators make mistakes... the higher up they are paid the more likely they are to do it. Take the manager covering for somebody on vacation... they jump in and mistype something... boom! data gone. Happens to the best of us... the really good ones have ways in place to make sure mistakes have a way of being undone.
how many AS400 operators typed PWRDWNSYS *IMMED and got a surprise!
What we've got here is failure to administrate.
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
Are there Darwin awards for websites?
Their admin is criminally incompetent.
Isn't that the same as saying "they had a Mac admin"?
Back in the nineties, a friend of mine was backing his mac system up weekly with a tape drive. The thing is, he was using the same tape to repeatedly back up onto. One day he calls to tell me he needed some help recovering files on his hard drive after a crash. I asked, "What about the tape backups?" He said, "That thing backs up perfectly. The problem is, it doesn't restore at all."
Seth
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!