Hi,
Have to say "Been there, done that," he says typing on a newly built
machine less than a month old.
Friday: Hmm there's a few SMART errors reported. Oh well they look minor
I'll look at them soon.
Monday night: "Bob I'm getting I/O errors whenever I try to run a command".
Argh! One half of the RAID array looks dead and the other riddled with
bad blocks including some of the main support librarys. Oh and the
backup is nearly a month old.
Power cycle, maybe it just needs a restart. Not even a Grub screen.
Goes to read lots of messages on the web about how disk failure in RAID
arrays puts stress on the rest and can often cause rapid failures of
other members.
So seven days later with a brand new machine and base gentoo install I
load what I think is the working half of the RAID array into a cradle.
Not an electronic sausage, won't even spin up.
Not looking forward to relying on that month old backup for recovery I
try the other half of the RAID. It buzzes and hums alarmingly and then
springs into life. Like a demon I "cp -a" /home and /etc to a safe
location on the new system. Within a few hours have the old
configuration up and running. Big sigh of relief.
I was lucky, but some important lessons and reminders for all. RAID is
not a magic wand, you still need regular backups. Once a month or so is
not frequent enough for backups. Backup /etc as well as /home.
ps. I backup to a separate hard drive that I install in a USB cradle.
It is kept separate from the main machine when I am not performing a
backup. Avoids the possibilty of formating the wrong drive when doing
something tricky. New backup regime two drives on alternate weeks.
--
Bob Dunlop
--
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