On 7/6/06, Brian Weaver <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Speaking as someone who just had a server failure and is *still* trying to recover from it. Backup often and AUTOMATE it, and for the love of all that's holy... do a test restore from your backups on a semi regular basis!
yes. we should have automated backup. I have a dedicated backup server for this. I think I might have been happier if my box had a "catastrophic"
failure, but what happened was more insidious. The memory went south, but not so bad that it would crashed the box. It introduced problems into my database and potentially into the process of trying to extract the data from the box. Since the memory wasn't bad enough to cause the box to fail I didn't notice a problem for a while. So every time I did something that saved information from main memory back to disk I was potentially corrupting my data.
That was serious. I can't imagine if it ever happens to me. As a result I was wondering what dbmail users think of this potential
enhancement: Add a column in the database for the physical message blocks that is the MD5 or SHA hash of the block at insert. This could be used by the dbmail utility to do a data validation and to catch problems in the db that might be caused by either memory or disk errors.
this i believe involve some overhead but I also think it should present as an option.
