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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.
DUH!
And that's why your IT department actually needs funding. Sleep tight.
Incremental backups to tape every night, full backup at the weekend. Tapes must be stored off-site at a proper storage location. Got lots of data and a small backup window? Get a faster tape drive and a tape robot. It costs money, but you data costs more.
This is at a minimum people. Come on!
Considering how complete and unrecoverable the loss is, they have no idea who their users are. The accounts would have to be recreated from scratch, but who would try? Their users have no reason to ever trust them again. Journalspace would have a difficult time wooing back their original users, and no new user would seriously consider using them.
Bowing out is the only recourse, but I'm glad they're considering releasing their source code.
In today's world where primary storage and protection storage are well-defined, and where entire industry grew around it (examples: NetApp, Data Domain), one is hard-pressed to understand the reason for such a debacle. The reading of the note referred to in the article leads me to believe, unfortunately, that Journalspace's IT department did not understand the difference.
It is sometimes considered a bad form to say something bad about fellow techies. We prefer to look for 'outside' causes. Still, to learn and avoid the same problems in the future, one has to admit his mistakes first. This paragraph from the Journalspace's page:
The value of such a setup is that if one drive fails, the server keeps running, using the remaining drive. Since the remaining drive has a copy of the data on the other drive, the data is intact. The administrator simply replaces the drive that's gone bad, and the server is back to operating with two redundant drives.
makes me believe there is a denial going on.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
My guess (and this is a guess, I'd never heard of the site before yesterday) is that this is some guy who started his own little site and it got bigger and bigger. Basically he never designed the backup, the system was just slowly pieced bigger and bigger until it got to it's current state.
The comments in the messages from the site's operator about the cost of the drive recover and thinking both drives just died at once indicate to me that this site was basically a hobby for him and he isn't experienced as an admin.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
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.
You don't just need backups. You need to TEST them. Having a backup run every night is nice and all; but if the tapes are unreadable and no error was reported, or if you're doing it wrong and the backup is corrupted and you only find out when you come to restore ....